Hardware: A-Bit BE6 Motherboard, 256 MEG PC100 RAM, Nvidia Riva TNT2 (32meg)Video, 2 each D-Link (Via Rhine) 10/100 ethernet, Adaptec 19160 SCSI(PCI)Cntrl, 18gig Western Digital Ultra2 LVD, Acer IDE 44x CDROM, & Intel PIII 450mhz Description: After an install ALL Version 7 install,using the graphical login the Gnome System information page shows 63820 total memory. Also /proc/meminfo shows only 63820 total. The motherboard successfully counts all 256 meg. I have re-installed Caldera eDesktop 2.4 (to ensure there was not an hardware problem) and it reports 256 meg. Then re-installed version 7 selecting only about 1gig worth of packages and once again Red Hat Gnome and KDE system info only show 64 meg of main memory when there is 256 meg installed.
This is a BIOS problem with E801 size reporting. There are patches to use the E820 memory sizing scheme in 2.2 but they currently dont catch bioses that lie about this and that can cause catastrophic disk corruption so we dont include them. You can use mem=255M on the boot line to tell Linux you have more memory. 2.4 kernels will address this issue properly.
You can also fix this problem by getting the newest bios upgrade from abit (www.abit-usa.com). As I have just discovered, this problem occurs with the BF6 motherboard as well.