
Dear list,
 
I've recently installed R on a 64 bit machine with 8 GB of RAM. I set this computer up as a dual-boot system, with windows XP 64 and Ubuntu 7.10. I downloaded the Linux 64 bit version of R and installed it. 
 
I'm trying to run rather large Random forest models and was running into severe memory limitations with my old windows 32 bit machines.
 
When I run Random Forest models on my new machine, I get the error message: 
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 2.1 GB. 
 
I'm a new Linux user, but I thought that R under Linux would by default take advantage of all available memory. I've searched previous posts and found only 1 thread (posted by David Katz) that didn't really help.
 
Do I need to specify that the Ubuntu/Linux OS use all 8 Gigs of RAM? Could I have done something wrong when I downloaded and installed R? 
 
I'd appreciate any advice. 
 
Thanks in advance,
 
Zack
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