I’ve been working over the last few days to fix up a lot of the electronics currently lying around the house for eventual sale. For a few laptops this involves wiping the OS on them and installing a new one. Since I’m targeting my fellow Linux geeks, I’ve been putting Ubuntu on them.

One of my favorite old laptops is an IBM Thinkpad X40. It was built with an older Intel CPU, one that doesn’t support the memory extensions known as PAE. Beginning with Ubuntu 12.04, the OS doesn’t normally install on these older laptops as Ubuntu expects a PAE-capable CPU. So what’s a geek to do?
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