I never heard that anybody solved this issue, but I read that many people have this issue too.
On my computer there are only 3 GB + 768 MB of 4 MB available. The graphics has got it's own framebuffer, 256 MB, but IIRC I once have seen that the framebuffer is 512 MB. I guess I can see it running NVIDIA settings, but at the moment I can't run it, because I'm using the nv driver. IIRC memtest86+ did always show the complete memory on my machine. I don't care, since it doesn't make a difference if I got 4GB or 3.8GB. However, I read often about this 8GB issue, for different distros. And it where definitive threads about 64-bit architecture, not about 32-bit and PAE issues.
Yes on 64 bit systems you will see the maximum memory. On 32 bit you need a PAE enabled kernel to get any more than 4Gig. If you have less than 4Gig you may want to use the PAE kernel in any case because if you have a relatively modern cpu it will support hardware Non execute protection. On a non-PAE kernel you will see NX protection disabled or such in dmesg. -- _______________________________________________________________________ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) _______________________________________________________________________