hii ..
i wnna upgrade my RAM from 256 M to 1 G ... will linux cause any troubles ? i mean i hope it doesnt hang in boot process .. coz sometimes it does .. while enabling swap space ... last time when i was trying to use a fren's hard disk as secondary .. it didnt boot ... it said unable to mount the other drive !!! and then lotsa gibberish ... my kernel is 2.6.9-1.667 ... if i upgrade my RAM to 1 GB ... then will it boot properly ... and also my swap partition is 1 GB ... do i need to make more swap partition ?
secondly .. my classmates .. many of them , who have SATA drive complain that the FC3 is not probing SATA drive during installation ... i have a ULTRA ATA IDE .. so i never faced any problem ...
wot does it mean ,... tht it doesnt detect it ... moreover .. when one of them booted through KNOPPIX LIVE CD ... and tried to mount a partition ... it didnt mount !!
he even specified the file system .. and the partition number ...
wot has to be done to get SATA working ? some BIOS upgrade or something ? ...

Well I believe I can attempt to answer some of your questions.

Upgrading to 1GB of RAM should not cause any troubles. One thing that is important to note though. If you do not have "high memory" support enabled in your kernel then your linux system will only pick up ~830MB of your memory. There is some debate on whether or not enabling high memory support to get linux to recognize the rest of your memory is a performance increase or decrease but I'll leave that up to you.

It is my opinion that you do not need to increase your swap size when you have 1GB of RAM. I have 1GB of RAM in my machine and I RARELY access my swap space. My swap space is 512MB, so if anything you could cut it in half and use the extra 512MB somewhere else.

Well I'm assuming that the motherboard supports SATA so most likely it's not a BIOS issue (unless SATA is disabled in the BIOS, check that.) In order to get SATA support in linux you have to find out the name of the SATA chipset on the motherboard. After that you have to check your kernel config to see if you have the correct SATA drivers enabled.

I hope I've helped.