memory reported less than installed

[David Fox]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 10:27 AM, Bill Walton <bill.walton at charter.net> wrote:

> I don't think so.  The system's got an NVIDIA card and I've got the driver
> enabled.  I'll try disabling the driver and see if that makes a difference.

Well I have 2 gig of ram, so scale as appropriate:

dfox at newbox:~/Desktop$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1932840    1917000      15840          0       1128    1013876
-/+ buffers/cache:     901996    1030844
Swap:      1951888       1928    1949960

The Total Mem (1932840) should be accurate, minus some for the nvidia
driver as I have an onboard 6100 nvidia card on a motherboard chipset.

But I believe that some of the "missing' RAM is reserved by the
kernel, so it would be logical to assume what you see is 10 gigs of
ram +/-fudge factor for gigabits*1024 vs. gigabits*1000, minus
whatever ram is taken up by the kernel. System Monitor would simply
report the same total memory value as "free" does.