I had written a string of posts on the process of installing and tweaking Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). As part of that effort, I wrote a post on using a PAE-enabled kernel, which would permit 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 to access more than 3GB - 4GB of RAM. Unfortunately, that post somehow got vaporized. This post provides the steps needed to use PAE in Ubuntu 10.04.
I found an
Ubuntu community webpage that said that, in Lucid, the CD and DVD installers would automatically install the PAE-enabled kernel. I had installed 10.04 using Update Manager, however, and I was not seeing the PAE kernel listed in the GRUB boot menu when I started the system. Following the advice on the community webpage regarding how to install PAE manually, I went to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and searched for PAE. This showed me that, sure enough, the packages named in the community webpage (i.e., linux-generic-pae and linux-headers-generic-pae) were not installed. When I marked those two for installation, they automatically brought along some others.
After Synaptic downloaded and installed those packages, I rebooted the system. I didn't notice what the BIOS and GRUB said when it rebooted, so when Ubuntu was back up, I typed "uname -r" in Terminal. It said 2.6.32-22-generic-pae. So it appeared the PAE updated had been successful. I typed "free -m" to see how much RAM I had. It saw a total of 8068 (i.e., 8GB). So it had worked: the PAE kernel was recognizing more than 4GB of RAM.
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