I recently got a new PC and installed the 32 bit version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on it. However, I was dismayed to see that the RAM displayed as 3 GB even though I had installed 4 GB of RAM.
I recollected the same problem with Windows XP and it s inability to address more than 3 GB of RAM on a 32 bit Operating System.
Eventually, I stumbled on the fact that I had the following options
- Install the 64 bit version
- Recompile the Kernel with PAE support
- Upgrade to the server version of the Kernel which has PAE enabled
Options 1 and 2 sounded a bit of a waste of time and I decided to go with option 3.
This was pretty simple. All I had to do was to run the following commands in the terminal
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-server
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-server
sudo apt-get install linux-image-server linux-server
Voila, I had 4 GB of RAM available for use after that.
Thanks to samiux