I am curious, where in PCLOS do you go to see how much RAM you have?

[happy cricket]

I do not see it in the Admin Center.

[AndrzejL]

free -m in konsole will show You all

[andrzejl@WISHMACER ~]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2017       1966         50          0         43        985
-/+ buffers/cache:        938       1079
Swap:          517          0        516
[andrzejl@WISHMACER ~]$

2017 MB of RAM 1966 used and 50 free - 43 buffered and 985 cached

517 MB swap 0 used and 516 free...

2017 MB = 2048 = 2 GB - 31 MB stolen by graphic card...

Hope this helps.

Andy

[happy cricket]

Thanks. 

[Yue]

or if you prefer a more graphical approach and you use KDE (3 or 4), you can use kinfocenter in the section Memory. You can open it by typing kinfocenter in konsole.  

[Bald Brick]

One could also add that the output of free -m is in megabytes.

Plain free gives your memory in kilobytes, and so does free -k,
while free -b gives it in bytes and free -g in gigabytes.

(You won't find the "g" option in the manual page of free. It isn't very useful either.)

It seems that the kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes mentioned above
aren't real decimal kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes but traditional binary ones.

[jaydot]

heh, heh, blackbird, the binary ones are the real ones.  it's the manufacturers' rounded downs that are the phoneys.

[Bald Brick]

heh, heh, blackbird, the binary ones are the real ones.  it's the manufacturers' rounded downs that are the phoneys.

Ah, Jaydot,

Very many years ago, on my first visit to Britain, you had a monetary system consisting of farthings, ha'pennies, pennies, tuppences, thrupennies, sixpences, shillings, florins, half-crowns (but no crowns), twelve-shillings (not really if you weren't a collector), pounds and guineas. I loved it. It seemed so much more gracious than our silly centesimal setup created by bureaucrats.

But even within your gentlemanly system the prefixes retained their ordinary meanings. A ha'penny was not 0.512 pence. Sixpence didn't mean 6.12 pence.

Not so in the IT world. Usually the prefix "kilo" means 1000. Usually the prefix "giga" means 1,000,000,000. But when we are talking about computers, "kilo" suddenly means 1024 and "giga" means something between 1,024,000,000 and 1,073,741,824? Doesn't calling 1,000,000,000 bytes a real "gigabyte" and 1,073,741,824 bytes a "gibibyte" make more sense?

[7272andy]

It may make sense blackbird, but in reality it is due to a confusion in the units in use.
Under the SI sytem the term giga does mean 1000³ as you point out, but the JEDEC Memory Standards and the IEC 60027 use the term giga to denote 1024³.
Harmonisation of standards would be nice, but I don't think it's going to happen any time soon, so for the time being confusion is bound to reign.

Regards
Andy

EDIT
I forgot to mention that the JEDEC standard actually uses the term gibi while the IEC and the SI use giga

[ElCuervo]

So, back on topic :

Re: I am curious, where in PCLOS do you go to see how much RAM you have?

gkrellm - memory and much more, always running on my PCs.

[7272andy]

I usually use the KInfoCenter but I do some times use free for a quick look at things

Regards
Andy

[AndrzejL]

Overcomplicated...and what if I use Gnome desktop. Can I still use KInfoCenter? Prolly not... Gkrellm is very cool but not installed by default... ONE command in console will give You the answer in a second... but thats just me... take no notice .

Andy

[7272andy]

Like you say Andy it depends on your environment, I'm still on KDE3.x with 4.x running in a virtual machine (temporarily) and free will always give me a quick snapshot of what happening.

Running the systemguard applet gives a nice real time display in the panel for those that want it too.

Andy