Re: [Help] Memory

[glhenni@cs.sandia.gov (Gary L. Hennigan)]

nguyen@lab3.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp (Nguyen Hai Ha) writes:
| Hi folks,
| 
| I've just installed the debian 2.0.34 on my machine.
| Everything seems to work well excepts the memory.
| The real memory consists of 2 DIMM 128M+32M. But it
| seems to me that the kernel doesn't think so.
| 
| % cat /proc/meminfo
| 
|         total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
| Mem:  15171584 13418496  1753088  7012352   593920  6090752
| Swap: 119697408  5156864 114540544
| MemTotal:     14816 kB
| MemFree:       1712 kB
| MemShared:     6848 kB
| Buffers:        580 kB
| Cached:        5948 kB
| SwapTotal:   116892 kB
| SwapFree:    111856 kB
| 
| I think this is the problem of the kernel's configuration.
| Please tell me something. Thanks in advance.

It's probably something strange going on with the BIOS function used
by linux to detect the amount of memory in your computer. I have two
suggestions you can try:

1) Manually edit /etc/lilo.conf and add a line like:

append="mem=160M"

or, if you already have an "append" line add it to the line like:

append="floppy=thinkpad,mem=160M"

2) Alternatively, upgrade to kernel 2.0.36 or higher. Starting with
2.0.36 the memory detection uses an extended BIOS call to get the
amount of memory and this could solve your problem. If Windows can
properly find the amount of RAM then a Linux kernel >= 2.0.36 will
also, since they use the same BIOS call.

Gary