How to find out how much RAM i have on Lubuntu

Alright, on previous article i show you how to get information about your processors/CPU using lscpu command, next question is how to find out how much RAM i have when i'm inside lubuntu.

There are few ways also to answer this question, but the easiest way is using program called hardinfo  (system information and benchmark tool) which is comes with lubuntu installation.

Using HardInfo (system information and benchmark tool)

To open hardinfo you can go to lubuntu start menu > System Tools > System Profiler and Benchmark (i'm using lubuntu 15.10, older version might be different).

Under 'Devices', select 'Memory', you will see 'Total Memory', that is the actual RAM size installed on your computer, but it's on kilobyte (kB).

As you can see i have 4068124 kB of RAM that means i have 4 GB of RAM on my acer laptop, besides showing hardware information, hardinfo can also be use as benchmark tool, you can find it under 'Benchmarks'

Using /proc/meminfo file

If you prefer command line, you can use the /proc/meminfo file to find out about how much RAM do you have on your system, simply run it with 'cat' command.

cat /proc/meminfo

kernelpanic@kernelpanic-laptop:~$ cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:        4068124 kB
MemFree:         2736060 kB
MemAvailable:    3457632 kB
Buffers:          131020 kB
Cached:           704616 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:           799432 kB
Inactive:         441984 kB
Active(anon):     407472 kB
Inactive(anon):   133936 kB
Active(file):     391960 kB
Inactive(file):   308048 kB
Unevictable:          32 kB
Mlocked:              32 kB
HighTotal:       3209628 kB
HighFree:        2260576 kB
LowTotal:         858496 kB
LowFree:          475484 kB
SwapTotal:       2025468 kB
SwapFree:        2025468 kB
Dirty:                 8 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:        405828 kB
Mapped:           258428 kB
Shmem:            135632 kB
Slab:              61412 kB
SReclaimable:      46848 kB
SUnreclaim:        14564 kB
KernelStack:        2208 kB
PageTables:         7108 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:     4059528 kB
Committed_AS:    2935116 kB
VmallocTotal:     122880 kB
VmallocUsed:       16264 kB
VmallocChunk:     106148 kB
AnonHugePages:    126976 kB
CmaTotal:              0 kB
CmaFree:               0 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
DirectMap4k:       38904 kB
DirectMap2M:      874496 kB

As you can see, the /proc/meminfo give me the same information about how much RAM i have, it's 4068124 kB (4 GB), i'm quite sure that it is accurate.

Using vmstat 

Another way to find out about RAM size is using the vmstat command, which also give me the same information about my RAM, 4068124 K of total memory.

vmstat -s

kernelpanic@kernelpanic-laptop:~$ vmstat -s
      4068124 K total memory
      1375312 K used memory
       850236 K active memory
       433120 K inactive memory
      2692812 K free memory
       133092 K buffer memory
       700528 K swap cache
      2025468 K total swap
            0 K used swap
      2025468 K free swap
       109206 non-nice user cpu ticks
         3042 nice user cpu ticks
        24232 system cpu ticks
      5263234 idle cpu ticks
        17738 IO-wait cpu ticks
            0 IRQ cpu ticks
          162 softirq cpu ticks
            0 stolen cpu ticks
       610571 pages paged in
       656744 pages paged out
            0 pages swapped in
            0 pages swapped out
      9499466 interrupts
     15022368 CPU context switches
   1449148317 boot time
         2891 forks

Using top command

I'm sure you already know about command line tool called 'top', this program can show you list of processes on our lubuntu, it also display information about how much RAM that we have on our computer, again it's display as kilobyte.

top

How to convert kilobyte (kB) into gigabyte (GB)

All program that i show you, display the memory/RAM size in kilobyte, so you need to convert it to gigabyte, the easiest way is to use google to convert kB into GB, like this: