[Gllug] How much system memory do I have?

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Thu, 7 May 2009, John Winters wrote:

> ryan-ir at hai.fi wrote:
> > Good Day all.
> > 
> > Last Monday I thought that I would go down to Tottenham Court Road
> > and buy myself a laptop. I got something but yesterday I started to
> > wonder about how much RAM this computer actually has - it says 4GBs
> > on the box.
> 
> [snip report of different OSs seeing different amounts of RAM]
> 
> There are two different questions here:
> 
> 1) How much RAM does my computer have?
> 
>    Pretty certainly 4 Gigs

lshw should tell you for sure.
 
> 2) How much RAM can my OS address?
> 
>    If you're running a 32-bit operating system then you will find that
> the OS is restricted to anywhere between 3 and 3.5 Gigs.

I'm pretty sure this can be fixed by compiling in PAE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

It's just a single option in the kernel config.  However this means
you're running your own kernel, even if it's built via whatever src
deb/rpm technique you use rather than a plain tar extract build process,
you'll always have to remember that you've diverted from the path of
least resistance.

You /might/ find your dist has a -pae version of the kernel package.

You're much more likely to find that 3GB is fine and not worth the
effort faffing around compared to...

> Install the 64 bit version of Ubuntu and you will find you can use all
> your RAM.

This is now a lot less painful than it was.

Damion
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