Downsides of PAE to support 8GB RAM

[Ol!ver]

Hi guys,

I'm planning on upgrading my home server to 8GB of RAM from the current 2GB that is in there. Unfortunately the machine is running a 32-bit version of 11.10.

My question is this: am I OK just enabling APE, or do I really need to format and install a 64-bit release?

I'm loathe to format as I've used the machine as a learning tool, and thus has various things installed such as LAMP, support for an Apple Time Machine backup system and the like. I really don't want to have to start afresh.

Any thoughts on the best course of action or, even better, a good way of doing the reformat/install without having to start afresh?

Cheers guys!

 

[masterluke]

You just need to update to a pae kernel

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnablingPAE

I did this without having to reinstall when I added memory.

You can upgrade to 64bit next time you have to reinstall.

EDIT - if you want to reinstall with a minimum of fuss the best option is to put your /home onto a seperate partition. That way you can zap the OS partition, reinstall, and keep your files and settings intact. Not much good to you now I know but maybe consider this the next time you reinstall.

 

[BusError]

If you don't use binary drivers, you can also run a 64 bits kernel and a 32 bits userland. Been running like that for many years on my home server and it works super. It gives more address space to userland, supports as much ram as you can get, but the userland stays compact.