Only seeing 3GB of RAM on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty when 4GB are installed? [SOLUTION]

I've been using Ubuntu Linux for a number of versions now. My Dell system has 4GB of memory (as verified by checking the BIOS at boot time) but after one of the upgrades it started to report that it could only see 3GB.

$ free

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:       3106764    2960304     146460          0     129636    1046552

-/+ buffers/cache:    1784116    1322648

Swap:            0          0          0

This seems to be a fairly common problem. I and some Ubuntu friends suffered for many months thinking that this just wasn't solvable, waiting patiently for the good Ubuntu folks to magically make it work again in a future version.

Then, one day I installed Ubuntu Feisty on a server at JohnCompanies, and I noticed that I could see all 4GB of RAM there.

With the knowledge that it was possible, I was able to figure out at least one way to get all 4GB on my desktop computer. As it turns out, I had installed the "desktop" (generic) version of Ubuntu Feisty on my system which exhibited the 3GB problem, but I had installed the "server" version of Ubuntu Feisty on the system which saw all the RAM.

Here are the simple steps that I took to upgrade my Ubuntu Feisty desktop to the server version of the kernel, gaining access to that last 1GB of RAM, while (so far it appears) losing nothing:

sudo apt-get install linux-server linux-headers-server

[...long wait...]

sudo reboot

I was using the NVIDIA device driver which did not appear to have a module for this kernel, so to get my X server back, I ran the NVIDIA installer:

wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/100.14.11/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-100.14.11-pkg1.run

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-100.14.11-pkg1.run

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart; exit

And now I have room to breath on this computer:

$ free

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:       4082096    2073904    2008192          0     195660    1114364

-/+ buffers/cache:     763880    3318216

Swap:            0          0          0

Defined tags for this entry: feisty, linux, ram, ubuntu

Posted by Eric Hammond in Programming at 17:59 | Comment (1)

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Thanks for the information. I installed the linux-server kernel today to solve the memory limitation and ran into the Nvidia issue that your howto resolves. Thanks again for the info!

#1 eatingorange on 2007-08-12 13:33

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Only seeing 3GB of RAM on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty when 4GB are installed? [SOLUTION]

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Only seeing 3GB of RAM on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty when 4GB are installed? [SOLUTION]

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