Well, I finally prevailed upon my brother to install Linux on his old crappy Compac Deskpro 2000, and it went well. He now has three computers and only the oldest one with Linux, but the pennies are beginning to drop! It's a start, anyways. But I digress. My main question is this:

I got a second 64 Meg stick, and installed it, but Linux doesn't recognize the extra memory. It should be 128 megs minus 8 megs for the shared video memory. Now, I remember somewhere reading about having to manually specify the RAM, but for the life of me, I do not know how to do this in RedHat 7.0.

It seems the computer is running a lot faster now even though it only says 63.944 megs in the Gnome system monitor. Maybe this is due to my cleaning the contacts at the same time as installing the new memory. So I'm not really sure if Linux is using the second 64 Megs or not. Any help gratefully accepted.

Harry

check the output of "free" for a more concrete display of your memory. to manually define your memory, just add

append=" mem=128 "

to /etc/lilo.conf, assuming you're using lilo. re-run "lilo" after editing it of course

How old is this deskpro? If it doesn't use DIMMs and has SIMM slots, you have to install memory in pairs. I.E. you would need two 32's instead of one 64. What does your BIOS see? If it's only 64, then that may be your problem.

Thanks for your expert advice, guys, but I'm still having a problem. I'm an eternal Newbie; what can I say?

The Deskpro belongs to my brother. Interesting thing about the Deskpro, it has it's bios program hidden on part of the hard drive, and when you install Linux,the bios utilities are erased! Not a big problem though - you just have to configure its bios using floppies.

I have a Pentium 233 with a PC Chips M748lmrt mainboard. I know it's not the best, but it has worked very reliably for me. I believe it can take the extra 64 Megs because it recognizes the memory both in the bios and in Windows 95. But when I changed lilo as suggested I got this error message:

Kernel panic: Kmem-cache-sizes-init
Error creating caches
In swapper task -- not synching.

When I edit out the append=" mem=120" and run lilo again it boots fine, but doesn't recognize the second stick of memory. The two memory sticks aren't exactly the same. One is a 100 Hz and the newer one is a 133 Hz. Also the newer one says 64 MB SYNCH. I'm suspicous about the two memory sticks not being 100% compatible together, but they seem to work, albeit, much slower, in Windows 95


So how did I goof it up this time?

Thanks once again,


Harry

133 memory is backwards compatible, and since you have a 100Mghz piece and a 133 piece, the 133 is only gonna run at 100. If it says 64 Meg Synch it's probably just short to fit the label on the chip in which case it's SynchDRAM or SDRAM, quite standard. Even though DIMMS (assuming since it's synch it'd have to be) don't have to be put in pairs, you can get weird effects from really cheap chips, chips that differ greatly or even the contacts as far as being gold or aluminum. Try each one seperately and see if you notice any differences. If your board supports 133Mghz chips then you should see a tad bit of diff. with that one in.

Try append="mem=120M" . Note the addition of the capital ' M '.

Well, I guess we attribute this one to the highly scalable nature of Linux. Maybe there's someone out there still using Linux with 128K, not 128M. But it's all good. Linux recognizes 119,744 now and I'm happy. Thanks to everyone. Now I can edit some really big graphics files in the Gimp.

Harry