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Can my computer handle linux?

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voidmain:
I try and put enough RAM in the machine so Linux never has to page (swap to the swap partition).  There are several ways to tell how much memory is in use (I like the "top" command for a quick easy look, but there are better commands like "sar").  There is no one magic number for the amount of RAM, depends on how you use it and what apps you run.

Note about automatically detecting RAM.  I have seen on the rare occassion where a machine might have certain amount of RAM and Linux only detects and uses a fraction of that.  It's not a problem though because you can pass a parameter to the kernel in the LILO or GRUB configuration to tell the kernel how much RAM you really have (I had one with onboard video that used a portion of the system memory for video, there was 128MB total but Linux only detected 64.  I just specified 120MB in the LILO configuration and everything was fine. The missing 8MB was used by shared video.).  This is rare but it can happen on certain machines.  Just make sure you don't specify more RAM than you really have or the machine will not boot (test your mem=xxx parameter interactively at the LILO prompt first).  You'll know when you run "top" or any other command that shows you how much physical RAM Linux detected.

[ June 24, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

lazygamer:
OH GOODY! /floors 384mb gas pedal

Pantso:
Hmm, I never had a problem with Linux not detecting the amount of RAM on my system correctly. But the point is that if you don't want your system to go into swap all the time use more RAM. If you intend to use Linux in text mode though, I don't think that any lack of RAM would pose serious problems.

voidmain:
Out of probably around 500 Linux installs I've seen it only twice that I can think of. Once on an old Dell server and once on a Microshack desktop (cheap machine).

Pantso:
That's one of the things I love about Linux. It only runs well on descent hardware  ;)

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