Hi, On Wed, 29 Aug 2007, Krsnendu dasa wrote:
> I'll be starting with 4 GB of RAM, (possibly increasing it in future.) Which > kernel should I use? As 32-bit machines usually address memory on a 32-bit address space, if you have more than 2^32 bits of memory (about 4GB), you run out of addresses and can't use the remaining RAM. Actually, PCI devices must also be mapped into the 32-bit address space which usually leaves you with more like 3-3.5GB). If you're using a 32-bit kernel, you can either use: - the -generic- which will usually use a little over 3GB (4GB minus some address space used by the pci devices) - the -server- which should use the full memory (using PAE), but at some processing cost http://www.spack.org/wiki/LinuxRamLimits If you use a 64-bit kernel, just using the standard -generic- kernel will allow you to address 2^64 bytes, so you don't need to worry about memory limits. The only thing is that fully 64-bit systems are relatively new and still have some issues, usually with proprietary software (eg. there is no adobe flash plugin or acrobat reader for 64-bit). You can if you wish do more complex things to run 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/32bit_and_64bit http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=616&num=1 I'm not sure what the issues are with WINE and 64-bit but it seems likely a 32-bit windows app will need to run in 32-bit mode on linux. Gavin -- edubuntu-users mailing list edubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users