Comment 170 for bug 930447

Stan, just an FYI, in case you haven't read any of the previous posts. The Pentium-M supports PAE just fine, it just lies about not having it. Not sure what your 13 year old IBM uses however. My IBM is 9 years old (doing the math on that surprises me immensely, not realizing it was that old already, but its still going strong!).

If you DO have a Pentium-M, there are instructions here how to use the ISO via grub on a USB stick. Its quite painless.

If however you have an older Pentium, that predates the Pentium M, it is still possible it features PAE! It was first introduced on the Pentium Pro (e.g. the first i686 if memory serves right, which PRE-dates the Pentium III of which the Pentium-M is based on). Though the Pentium-M seems to start in 2003, mean, leaving me to wonder what ancient CPU you have ;) Though even the Pentium III should support PAE, which does date 13 years back.

RE-reading the wikipedia article (which I admit I haven't done in a while) it claims the following.

"PAE is supported by Intel Pentium Pro and later Pentium-series processors except most 400 MHz-bus versions of the Pentium M."

I hope that line makes it clear why this is causing an issue for us Pentium-M users. That the Ubuntu team decided to no longer support non-PAE hardware makes perfect sense, it predates the Pentium-Pro. So we're talking CPU's with less then 150 MHz to put it in context (yes MHz means nothing, but 150 MHz should tell you something). Very valid reasoning. But whoever made the decision overlooked the Pentium-M, and no none of the Ubuntu folk even look at this thread to see why this is a problem.