Some time ago we talked about using more than 3 GB of RAM in Ubuntu 32bit which involved installing the server kernel. Well, this is no longer possible in Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10).

Ubuntu 32bit only supports 3 GB of RAM so if you have 4, only 3 will be used. You can use the 64bit version for all 4GB of RAM memory to work, or follow the instructions in this post to make the 32bit version of Ubuntu to work with 4GB or RAM.

Mem Info is an interesting Python script that allows you to check the RAM usage of processes that are running on your computer. What's great about it is that you can see the memory used by all the instances of an application, together which can be very useful in certain situations, for example: the RAM memory used by all the tabs of Chromium browser, etc.

tmpfs is a virtual, RAM-backed filesystem. It’s lightning-fast, but since it’s RAM-backed, any file written to tmpfs uses precious memory while it’s there, and the entire contents of the virtual partition are lost on shutdown or crash.

tmpfs is a virtual, RAM-backed filesystem. It’s lightning-fast, but since it’s RAM-backed, any file written to tmpfs uses precious memory while it’s there, and the entire contents of the virtual partition are lost on shutdown or crash. The good news is that these detriments can be minimized, making tmpfs a viable choice for your profile directory.

Nowadays, many machines are running with 2-4 gigabytes of RAM, and their owners are discovering a problem: When they run 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions, their extra RAM is not being used. Fortunately, correcting the problem is only a matter of installing or building a kernel with a few specific parameters enabled or disabled.