64 bit info

[Hakan Koseoglu]

Karl,

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 3:20 PM, Karl F. Larsen <klarsen1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Notice I have 2 GB of RAM and the 64bit 9.10 is using just
> 1.45 GB of the RAM. I wasted $92 on new fast RAM which I was
> assured you need

As far as I managed to follow the mailing list, no one insisted on you
to go and purchase more RAM and no one knowledgeable stated that you
need 4GB to run 64 bit. No one told you to go ahead and switch to 64
bit.

64 bit is useful above 4GB. Your PC's BIOS can have problems and you
should not go over the supported amount of RAM. Some of these can be
visible by problems above. Mind you, if you had Windows XP or Windows
Vista or 7, if your motherboard won't let you use it, you won't be
able to. The laptop I'm writing this mail has 4GB RAM but only 3.4 is
visible to the OSes.

64 bit can be useful below 4GB, there are some performance benefits
and some performance losses. More, using special kernels you can use
more than 4GB on 32 bit systems but no process can address such big
chunks themselves and would be limited to 3.6GB each. On the other
hand, unless you are running some big database server at your desk,
this should not be relevant to you.

> 73 Karl
Karl, this is what suprises me. Although you are an elderly gentleman,
I do not believe this would prevent you from using modern operating
systems. What suprises me is such a person who has managed to master
such an interesting hobby refuses to investigate the issue in front of
him and relies on and (insists generating) heresay and irrelevant
chatter and gives occasional bad advice.

About 64 bit, I have two PCs & two laptops running 64 bit Ubuntu &
Kubuntu with everything (DVD, flash, firefox, huge LCDs) running
perfectly happily. I have a little netbook running 32 bit Ubuntu,
again with all of the bells & whistles. Everything is as stable as
they usually are with Ubuntu, some are better, some are worse.

Linux is about choice. Use whatever you want but please don't go
around blaming people for own mistakes.

73 Hakan (M1FCJ, M1/TA2MGW)