Hello everyone,

yesterday evening I updated my Etch to Testing/Lenny. It went rather smooth and quick, except for two - really unpleasant - issues:

1) it shows in the "System Information" application of GNOME that I have only 885 MB of RAM, although in the reality I have 2 GB;
2) while booting, it shows that cpufreq daemon failed to start.

I'm not completely new to Linux, but I would appreciate any help. Especially with RAM - I never saw anything like this earlier.

Cheers,
Andrey

31.10.2008: both issues were resolved. For the memory: reinstall kernel (*-486 -> *-686). For the cpufreq: install cpufrequtils package via Synaptic.

Cheers,
Andrey

Impatient much? http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=32048

You need to install a HIGHMEM4G capable kernel.

Not necessarily. For 2GB, a -686 kernel (which is recommended on the other thread where he asked this question) is probably good enough.

A NO_HIGHMEM kernel will only give you 883MB or something like that. You must go to the 4GB kernel to get the rest. It may be called something else, but it's config file will contain "CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y". If the config has "CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM=y" you are stuck with less than 1GB no matter what your physical RAM size.

I don't have a -686 kernel installed, so I can't say about that. But I just checked the -486 kernel I have and it is not HIGHMEM4G capable.

Correct, but all kernels other than -486 would recognize 2 GB. I thought that you meant that the OP would have to install specifically the -bigmem Debian kernel in order to get 2 GB of memory recognized, and that I know is false. But you are of course correct that you need the HIGHMEM4G=y option enabled in the kernel. All Debian kernels except the -486 one has that option enabled, just as they are all SMP enabled.

Thanks for the clarification. For various reasons, I haven't used a stock kernel in a long time.

Hello everyone,

the issue with RAM is resolved. It was my fault - I occasionally installed 486-version of the kernel (instead of 686). As I read here, it had limitations on available RAM amount. Yesterday I changed the versions, and now it works properly.

But the issue with CPUFreq is still there... Any hints?

@Telemachos: I'm patient enough, but I usually try to get the information from all available sources. I will publish my resolution in that forum either.

Cheers,
Andrey

As I asked on the other forum where you posted this question, do you have any error messages that show up when it fails? It's hard to help if all we know is that it doesn't work.

Hello,

I know it, and I posted already the errror message in that other forum.

By the way, yesterday I "met" this bug in GRUB (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501306). It costed me sometime to resolve it (not to reprogram it, but to find a workaround). I will post it later in my blog.

Cheers,
Andrey

Yesterday I resolved it either. I simply installed "cpufrequtils" package - it was sufficient to resolve the issue.

Cheers,
Andrey