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I have two M1400 and I can successfully boot and installed Bodhi Linux on one of them. When I try to boot it on the second one I get a Kernel Error saying that the CPU doesn't support PAE.

The two PC's are practically Identical, The same Bios version, same internals. The only difference is that one of them has about 756Mb memory, while the other only has 256Mb... My original question was about if there was a memory requirement but then I had the idea of switching them, but I got the same message.

Even the System information indicates that the CPU are exactly the same.

I'm not familiar with what difference PAE does exactly, so I'm wondering if maybe because the two hard drives are from different manufacturers?

Any explanation? (The model number is the same too?, I'm confused why one works and the other doesn't.

Mallow
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No it has to do with RAM. Check out the Wikipedia page on PAE (Physical Address Extension).

excerpt

In computing, Physical Address Extension (PAE) is a feature to allow 32-bit x86 central processing units (CPUs) to access a physical address space (including random access memory and memory mapped devices) larger than 4 gigabytes.

I also found out why Bohdi is demanding that you have PAE flag capability. This comment is from Bohdi's lead developer.

excerpt - How to install Bodhi 2.1.0 on non-pae computer

Bodhi directly utilizes kernel builds from upstream Ubuntu - always have - always will. They are moving to PAE only, so are we. Meaning we will be building future kernel from here on out as Ubuntu does. Unless you feel you can do better, in which case Bodhi is a community project - patches are accepted. You feel something is lacking, contribute it.

If you want out 2.x.y base on a non-pae system do as ylee suggests - our point updates are rolling release, so you will get the same package versions from 2.0.1 updated as 2.1.0 updated would have.

~Jeff

To debug this further, I'd need more information about the hardware you're attempting to use. Specifically any product number (not just model numbers) since there is some slight difference between the 2 boards. It could also be a mode switch somewhere that sets this on the board too.

slm
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  • I have torn down hundreds of PCs, and you'd be surprised as to how often even major manufacturers will switch components, even fundamental components, midstream. – K7AAY Oct 23 '13 at 18:50
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    @kiloseven - agreed. Where I used to work we did hardware design and when the design was released to manufacturing there was a list of equivalent parts that we maintained as well as our manufacturer. So often times you had to tear things down to find out for sure which set of parts ultimately got included in a given build of the product. – slm Oct 23 '13 at 18:54