As the development I’m doing gets more and more serious, I find myself missing the hideous nature of my old Alienware laptop, its dedicated RAID card was a real boon to multiple vmware images running at once, when the memory ran thin.

However with my latest machine (a badly butchered Compal FL92 which I’m normally very very happy with), there is no dedicated RAID card and the internal space and voltage won’t stand the double/triple height of the raptor 2.5 inch drive, sooo, i have to keep it away from the drive (the processor is fine), but I’m at 4Gb already, surely the little devil will take the latest 8Gb cards, a trip round the forums comes up with a guy with proof that the FL92 will take the Crucial 8Gb set, it’s £258 which is about what I was expecting. Clutching a credit card in my sweaty hands, I make my rash purchase.

Now that I’m committed (Crucial had it delivered to my hand by 9am on Saturday, when I ordered it Friday afternoon and I picked the slow, free postage), time to make it work with the old software EEEEK!, Linux Generic can’t cope with more than 3Gb, and 64 bit is not to be considered, as there is no flash player and lots of other software won’t work Update Vaughan Rivett’s has since corrected me that the 64bit version is just fine and not missing any of the good stuff, so ignore my drivelling End Update, hmmmm, but Linux servers have been running more than 4Gb for ages on 32bit, and indeed they can, using something called Physical Address Extension so I just have to swap out my kernel and it will be OK.

In Linux this is easy – just do the following in the nearest terminal:

$sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-server

$sudo apt-get install linux-headers-server

$sudo apt-get install linux-image-server linux-server

I then had to go into “/boot/grub/menu.lst

and add

title Ubuntu 8.04.2, kernel 2.6.24-24-server
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-server root=UUID=24bcaa1c-2860-4171-b760-e1129947958e ro quiet splash acpi_os_name=”Windows 2001 SP2”
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-24-server

at the top of the “## ## End Default Options ##” section (I just copied the 4 lines that were previously at the top of that section and changed the “initrd.img-2.6.24-24-server” and “vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-server” values so that they matched the latest changed files in the “/boot/” folder
then restarted.

and LOOK!!!

But would that new memory be passed on to the applications?

Well I’m happy!! (Where’s me copy of WAS??)