Like F. Stephen Costa, I interject here with some trepidation. I'm a user,
not a developer, who was bitten by the PAE bug when trying to upgrade my
Pentium-M Thinkpad from 12.04. It was very painful getting back to a
working, stable 12.04 after the aborted upgrade attempt.

I love my Thinkpad. I purchased it new in 2004 and it's still going strong,
although with a different hard drive and more RAM. I've invested in two
docking stations for home and work. Linux has extended it's usefulness well
beyond what the WinXP it came with would have. So John Washington's words
resonated with me, too.

I had resigned myself to leaving the Ubuntu fold when the long term support
for 12.04 finally ends. I was excited to read about the "fakepae trick" and
would really appreciate seeing howto instructions added to the wiki. Maybe
I can stick with Ubuntu after all!

-John Porubek


On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 7:41 AM, Chris Bainbridge <<email address hidden>
> wrote:

> sudodus, "forcepae" isn't in the mainline kernel yet so it's up to the
> Ubuntu Kernel team as to whether they add the patch to the kernel now
> and/or backport it to 12.04. For someone with Pentium M who wants to
> upgrade from 12.04 the easiest way would be to do the fakepae trick of
> mounting a modified version of /proc/cpuinfo that contains the pae flag
> over the original, and then do the upgrade. Instructions for that could
> be added to the wiki.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to a
> duplicate bug report (1094481).
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1160346
>
> Title:
>   do-release-upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 on Pentium-M fails, breaks system
>   without any warning (This kernel does not support a non-PAE CPU)
>
> Status in Ubuntu Release Upgrader:
>   New
> Status in "linux" package in Ubuntu:
>   Invalid
> Status in "ubuntu-release-upgrader" package in Ubuntu:
>   Triaged
>
> Bug description:
>   Attempting to upgrade from Precise with a non-PAE kernel will result
>   in a failed upgrade. do-release-upgrade should check whether the user
>   is using a non-PAE kernel and refuse to run, rather than upgrading to
>   a broken system with no installed kernel.
>
>   After downloading 1.5GB+ of data and over 1000 new packages, the
>   upgrade will eventually report failure. Looking through the logs there
>   is no kernel installed because of the error "This kernel does not
>   support a non-PAE CPU.":
>
>   Selecting previously unselected package linux-image-3.5.0-26-generic.^M
>   Unpacking linux-image-3.5.0-26-generic (from
> .../linux-image-3.5.0-26-generic_3.5.0-26.42_i386.deb) ...^M
>   This kernel does not support a non-PAE CPU.^M
>   dpkg: error processing
> /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image-3.5.0-26-generic_3.5.0-26.42_i386.deb
> (--unpack):^M
>    subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1^M
>   No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already
>
>   Related bugs:
>
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/897786 Kernel is
> dropping non-PAE flavour
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1068862 upgrade
> from 12.04 to 12.10 on a sans-pae CPU leaves kernel broken
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/1160346/+subscriptions
>