Re: tlug: To set the record straight.

[Shimpei Yamashita <shimpei@example.com>]

You(Yong-Ming Hua) wrote:
> Hi Jonathan,
> 
>    Well, I kinda thought your case strange. Right, Linux runs,
> there is no doubt about it.  But my machine which we have used
> for the past five years is:
> Pentium 120,
> Cache 64K,
> memory 96MB.
> 
>    But when I carefully read the first boot up message, it says
> something like memory=64MB....(obviously nullifying the 32MB!!!).
> So I want to use that 32MB, or any memory above 64MB. hmmmmmmmm
> I put mem=96MB to boot up, but the ol'girl doesn't accept it....
> somehow...

There did exist some Pentium motherboards that were too dumb to boot
with more than 64MB of RAM. There were also some other motherboards
whose RAM cache was designed so that performance would drop
precipitously if you had more than 64MB of RAM. Or something like
that. (I wasn't paying attention to all the bad things PC users were
going through back then, since I didn't have a PC at the time.)

Getting back to your problem, 2.0 kernels couldn't auto-recognize more
than 64MB of RAM. Another problem may be that your machine doesn't
quite recognize all 96MB of RAM. To solve the former problem, you
upgrade to one of the 2.2.x kernels (anyone here running 2.2.13? has
Linus finally gotten it right this time?); to solve the latter problem,
try mem=95MB instead of 96. If neither of those work, well...I dunno.
64MB of RAM in Linux is still pretty comfy. :-) [1]

Given that your computer has been working for five years (five...? Did
they sell P120's five years ago?), the latter scenario is more likely
to work. It is also possible, though, that you had a machine with
corrupt memory all these years, and didn't notice it since Linux pushes
RAM a lot harder than Windows.

[1] In contrast, try getting any work done with 64MB in NT. Of course,
one might say getting any work done with any amount of memory in NT is
a trying experience in and out of itself. But I digress.

-- 
Shimpei Yamashita   山下晋平      <http://www.submm.caltech.edu/%7Eshimpei/>
perl -w -e '$_="not a perl hacker\n";$q=qq;(.);x9;$qq=qq;345123h896789,;;$s=
pack(qq;H6;,q;6a7573;);$qq=qq;s,^$q,$s$qq;;$qq=~s;(\d);\$$1;g;eval$qq;print;'
-------------------------------------------------------------------
TLUG Akihabara Tour: October 23 (Sat), 13:00 Shosen Book Tower 2F
Next Technical Meeting: November 13 (Sat), 13:30 place: Temple Univ.
* Network Security                               speaker: Steve Baur
Next Nomikai: December 17 (Fri), 19:00 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
-------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan