Thursday, June 04, 2009

Ubuntu and 4 GB RAM

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

  1. Install the 64 bit version
  2. Recompile the Kernel with PAE support
  3. 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