0

I tried loading Ubuntu 14.04.3 onto an older Dell Inspiron Laptop and I get the following message: WARNING: PAE disabled. Use parameter 'forcepae' to enable at your own risk! This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU: pae unable to boot-please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

My question is what is a pae kernel, how do I find an "appropriate" kernel?

0

1 Answer 1

0

PAE stands for Physical Address Extension, and it's a CPU feature that was added approximately at the Pentium III generation in order to handle large RAM sizes. Despite this feature being part of the P3 architecture, a few P3 and P4 generation CPUs support the feature but incorrectly report they don't have it. The first thing to try is adding the "forcepae" parameter to the boot line GRUB uses -- that may solve the problem for you.

If that doesn't work, you'll need to find a non-PAE kernel build of Ubuntu, or change to another distribution that has non-PAE versions available (I've successfully used antiX in the past on Pentium 2 processors, but that distro was getting a little long in the tooth last time I looked at it).

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .