mjhjmtu

I am a newcomer to Linux, and I want to instal Linux Lite on an old Dell laptop.
It has 2GB of Ram, and is 32-bit.
I get a message that tells me I don't have the correct kernel on my CPU to instal, pae.
I have tried to download pae (in Mint) from Synaptic Package manager, and it tells me it has installed. However it does not show in an enquiry under flags.
Another forum implies that pae PREVENTS installation on a system with less than 3GB of RAM, whereas I understood it was necessary with an older machine.
Can anybody tell me whether I need pae, or not. And if I don't, why do I get the message?

Several older 32-bit CPUs/Atoms are not supported by newer kernels anymore.

Either you use a older version of the distro if any (for instance Debian 8 or distributions based on it).

For having security updates support for a longer period I went instead for FreeBSD in my older hardware, which has not dropped support for older CPUs.

Normally, a 32-bit processor can only address exactly 4 GiB of physical address space. That includes not only the real RAM, but also things like display adapter's video RAM if that's mapped to the system bus. Some other high-bandwidth add-ons may also have memory-mapped buffers.

PAE is a technique that allows 32-bit systems to use more than 4 GiB of memory. It does this by adding another level in the processor's page table hierarchy, effectively making all memory accesses a bit more complex.

If you have an old 32-bit processor with less than 4 GiB of memory, having PAE in use when there is no need for it will just hurt your performance. The effect may be small, but it's there - and with an old, slow processor you'd want all the speed you can get.

Enabling PAE requires the kernel's internal memory management structures to be laid out differently, so that's not a thing you can just easily flip on and off while the system is running - so that's why there is often separate kernel packages for PAE and non-PAE.