Great answers thank you!
Chris Knadle wrote:
On Sunday 08 November 2009, Orion Vianna wrote:
Hello,
I recently got an Asus G51 (best buy model) laptop and everything
works with Ubuntu Karmic. It came with 4gm of ram & gtx nvidia
260m. Should I use 32bit + PAE kernel to be able to use all the
ram or should I use 64bit ubuntu karmic? I'm planning on upgrading
to 8gb ram in the future.
PAE starts to use significatnly more ram in order to do the paging
starting at about the 8 GB level, and when using PAE a single process
is not able to use more than about 3 GB of RAM. I believe this means
that your virtual machine for XP through VirtualBox would be limited
to 3GB max; you'll have to decide if you can tolerate that.
There's also an interesting third option I'll just mention: you can
build a 64-bit kernel even though the rest of the system is 32-bit.
This requires a version of GCC that has 64-bit support built-in (GCC
on Ubuntu and Debian include this, but apparently Fedora does not).
Then you need to add 64-bit glibc development libraries and do a
cross-compile. Apparently the proprietary Nvidia driver does not
support this though, and is considered an expert option anyway. So
although it's interesting... don't.
And of course there's the option to run 64-bit (amd64, not ia64).
I suspect you'll end up going with this because it's the path of least
resistance for what you want to do.
Will I have problems with drivers (video card?) or software like
flash with ubuntu 64bit?
Both the proprietary Nvidia driver and Adobe Flash are available for
amd64 now.
Is the performance drop with PAE noticeable?
Not up to 4GB RAM.
-- Chris
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