How to find out how much memory your system using "dd" command...

[Frank Charles Gallacher <franxg@gmail.com>]

Greetings,

When I was a system administrator, there was a command to find out how
much real memory was on your system, logged in as root (making sure you
didn't confuse the input and output!):

dd if=/dev/mem of=/dev/null bs=1024 conv=noerror

It would chug away for a minute or two, then give you a number of
records in and out, this number was how many KB or RAM you had;
I tried this on debian, now all I get is a string of error messages...

Is there a better way???