Follow the instructions below to install or upgrade a Ubuntu (or any flavor) system with a Pentium M processor that doesn't announce its PAE support.

Installing

Starting with 14.04, you can use the forcepae parameter to force the system to use PAE. To do this:

• Boot with the installation media
• In the boot menu, highlight "Install Ubuntu"
• Press F6 to bring up the options textbox (see image below)
• Add "forcepae" after the last two dashes (see image below)

• Press Enter to boot.

Upgrading

Install a PAE kernel (to verify your system is PAE capable)

First, run

•   apt-get install linux-image-generic-pae

Reboot and then run

•   uname -a

This should output a line where the version number (eg. 3.11.0-17) ends with "-generic" and is 3.11.x or above.

Add the PAE flag to processor information

To add the PAE flag to the processor information stored in /proc/cpuinfo, run the following:

•   cat /proc/cpuinfo | sed 's/flags\t*:/& pae/' > /tmp/cpuinfo_pae
    sudo mount -o bind /tmp/cpuinfo_pae /proc/cpuinfo
    sudo mount -o remount,ro,bind /proc/cpuinfo

After you have ran those commands, run

•   grep flags /proc/cpuinfo

If the flag was correctly added, the command returns a line that starts with "flags :" and contains the flag "pae".