Recognizing my computer's RAM

[Shooter1]

Hello, I've been using Puppy on and off (mostly off) since 1.0.7 and have a basic question about ram.

My computer is a slightly older Fujitsu laptop Celeron with 512 Megs of ram with floppy, cdrom and 512M USB Flash drive which I would like to boot off of when wakeupusbpuppy2 is ready, since I can't boot directly from USB and in the case my CDrom ever conks out (I really appreciate your work btw!)

I just booted into Puppy2 alpha April 11th, 2006, added a desktop background image so I could read the on screen buttons installed firefox 1.5.0.2, and did a df -h with these results:

sh-3.00# df -h
Filesystem.........Size..........Used......Available.....Use%....Mounted on
/dev/root.......... 1.7M............1.6M..........104.0k.......94%....../initrd
tmpfs...............63.3M.........62.4M...........932.0k.......99%...../initrd/mnt/tmpfs
/dev/loop0......62.4M........62.4M...................0.......100%....../initrd/pup_ro2
tmpfs.............188.3M........26.4M.........161.9M.......14%......../initrd/pup_rw
none.............250.7M.........88.8M........161.9M.......35%......../

It seems to be telling me I have 161.9 Megs free but I can't figure out how the 512 megs of ram I have is being used. I ugraded my ram from 256 (actually 320, but had to take out the 64 meg simm) to 512 just so I could have 192 megs more room for some programs/languages I would like to install... Is there someone who can provide an explanation over how the ram is allocated?

Thanks, and jtlyk, I've become a become a big fan of puppy since I found out about it 5 months ago...

[Flash]

What do you see when you type "free" in a console?

[Shooter1]

[quote="Flash"]What do you see when you type "free" in a console?[/quote]
sh-3.00# free
......................total........used................free.........shared.......buffers
Mem:......515452...230356.........285096...................0........24792
Swap:................0...............0....................0
Total:......515452...230356.........285096

I guess according to this I have 285 megs free... then why is df -h telling me I only have 161.9 megs free? 285M free (from above)minus 162M free (df -h from the previous post) = 123.. how can I access this missing 123 megs?

just to see what would happen if I added a 10 meg file to /usr/local/<my firefox dir>

sh-3.00# cp firefox-bin firefox-bin_backup

I get this after a df -h and free:

Filesystem...........Size...........Used.......Available.....Use%....Mounted on
/dev/root...........1.7M.............1.6M..........104.0k .......94%......./initrd
tmpfs................63.3M...........62.4M...........932.0k.......99%...../initrd/mnt/tmpfs
/dev/loop0......62.4M........62.4M..................0......100%....../initrd/pup_ro2
tmpfs...............188.3M.........37.3M..........151.0M.......20%......./initrd/pup_rw
none................250.7M..........99.7M.........151.0M.......40%......./

......................total........used................free.........shared.......buffers
Mem:......515452...240900.........274552...................0........24792
Swap:................0...............0....................0
Total:......515452...240900.........274552

both the tmpfs and none have about 10M added to them but nothing else seems to change... If I do this 15 times:
sh-3.00# cp firefox-bin firefox-bin_backup01
.
.
sh-3.00# cp firefox-bin firefox-bin_backup15

the 16th time will give me this, after which I type free again:

sh-3.00# cp firefox-bin firefox-bin_backup16
cp: writing `firefox-bin_backup16': No space left on device
sh-3.00# free
......................total........used................free.........shared.......buffers
Mem:......515452...396640.........118812...................0........24792
Swap:................0...............0....................0
Total:......515452...396640.........118812

it tells me I still have 118M or so free... but where?