[KLUG Members] debian only showing half my ram?

[Jamie McCarthy]

rick@ricksweb.info (Richard Harding) writes:

> I installed debian with the beta 3 installer today. The server
> is a dual p3 with 2gig of ram. Only half of that is showing
> however.

If you were to compile your own kernel, you could "grep HIGHMEM
/usr/src/linux/.config" and make sure it says "CONFIG_HIGHMEM=y".
But if you took the stock Debian kernel you probably don't have
its .config file.

I'm pretty sure the kernels in the 'testing' and 'unstable' releases
have highmem enabled.  So the quick solution is to update to one of
those.  If you just installed, you're probably on 'stable' now,
which might sound good but in Debian-speak,

    stable means out-of-date, way old versions of packages

    testing means reasonably recent versions of packages and still
        stable enough for all but the most mission-critical systems
    
    unstable means very recent versions, but your system might get
        something hosed once or twice a year (usually X)

I run stable on my DNS/NFS server because that's all I use it for.
Most of my other systems are on unstable, I think one may still be
on testing.

To bump yourself up, edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change every
occurrence of the word 'stable' to one of the other two.  And if
you're leaving 'stable' behind, you can comment out
security.debian.org -- it's redundant anyway, all the mirrors have
the same security updates.  Do 'man sources.list' for more.

Once you've done that, do 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade"
and walk away while it downloads probably a few tens of MB of new
packages -- including, I believe, a highmem-enabled kernel.

The non-quick solution is to compile your own kernel.  If you're
familiar with kernel configuration options, this really is very
simple.  I use a script to rebuild my Debian kernel -- it makes a
.deb package out of it and then installs the package -- and I'm
happy to share if anyone wants it.

To use both CPUs, use apt to install one of the kernel-image-*-smp
packages, which for your Intel P3, as of today, in unstable, would
be kernel-image-2.4.25-1-686-smp, or if you're feeling daring,
kernel-image-2.6.4-1-686-smp.  If you don't know how to do that,
I'd suggest "apt-get install aptitude" and then play around with
aptitude to learn about it.  "dpkg --get-selections | grep foo" is
also a good way to see what packages you have installed.  The good
news is that you just installed a fresh OS, so if you really munge
it up badly, worst case, you waste a couple hours reinstalling :)
-- 
  Jamie McCarthy
 http://mccarthy.vg/
  jamie@mccarthy.vg