I am a newbie to Linux OS.
I have a Toshiba Laptop M35X that has 640Mb of ram. I added a 1Gb ram card. I boot Puppy via a live CD.
When I booted Puppy it indicated the same amount of ram (166Mb) as before the new 1Gb ram card was installed.
I used cat /proc/meminfo to get information on memory. It reports among other things:
MemTotal: 1521464 kB (~ The original 640Mb plus the new 1Gb)
MemFree: 577484 kB ?
I have looked through forums, but this problem was not addressed specifically. I did find out aboout /proc/meminfo, although under System/System Status and Config/Hard Info Hardware Information/Devices/Memory I get the same information.
Everything is working fine, but if I add programs I run the risk of running out of memory. I am also trying to figure out the discrepancy.

Your comment will add to my knowledge.
Juan

What exactly is your problem? You stated yourself (and the output of cat /proc/meminfo proves that) that your RAM is recognized.

Thank you for your reply. I am sorry I was not clear in reporting the actual discrepancy.
In the puppy linux that I am loading the taskbar reports the amount of free RAM available. In my case the task bar is reporting 166Mb free when it should report that plus the RAM that I added.
I don't know what is the program that displays the free RAM, and how it is acquiring its information.

Perhaps some RAM is just cached (the taskbar is not reading it correctly). What's the output of 'free -m'?

From the System Info program free memory is reported as 342Mb. The program also reports "Buffers" at 360Mb, and "Cached" at 643Mb.
The task bar reports "114M free".

That's why I don't trust GUI programs What's the output of 'free -m'?

I am sorry to appear dense, but how do I go about answering your question "output of free -m".

I mean it's just to double check it because your first post indicates that your memory is correctly recognised by the system.

What you need to do is to open the command line interface and type 'free -m'

I found out. Just type free.
Mem: total 1521Mb Used: 1232Mb Fre 288Mb. Shared: 0 Buffers 379Mb

Can you post the whole output?

# free
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 1521464 1204528 316936 0 379896
Swap: 0 0 0
Total: 1521464 1204528 316936
#

As you can see your RAM is recognised by your system. For some reason the panel you're talking about reads it in a wrong way.

PS. Try to post any output using CODE tags. It's much easier to read
Also 'free -m' also makes it easier to read as it displays the values in megabytes.

Here's some useful article about memory usage in linux:
http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

Thank you for your help.
In my terminal emulator the free -m command gives me the help message answer: "Displays the amount of free and used memory"
I did not know how to copy from the emulator to the message, or use CODE tags.
It seems like the used memory is one of the problems. It reports using 1.2GB. I don't know where the system is using all that memory.
I will look at your reference, and that may clarify the subject.
Thanks again.