You will need to save these as executable somewhere in your path, and run with sudo or as root.  Its a utility I have found used by people at a lot of distros.  I didn't write them.  mem is a batch script that runs the ps_mem.py python script.

sudo mem

This is my first machine with wattOS on it.  I am away from home for a week and attempting to set it up in such a manner that I'll be able to use a similar setup for my other laptops and desktops

I've worked on computers since college in the 1970's and built my first S-100 bus CP/M machine in 1980 or 1981, a couple years before IBM came out with PC's, and basically am very familiar with lots of different hardware, but most of my programming was business related,  so I never did much C or C++ or Jave type stuff unless I had no other way to get the job done.

I worked with Microport UNIX in 1986 and then ATT Unix and SCO Xenix in the 80's and early 90's for businesses and then gave it up when there were major OS related problems and I moved some of them over to networks.   In the mid 90's I played with Mandrake, and eventually they changed, and then in the 2000's I worked with a nuber of distros trying to get my stock market account trading over onto Linux, but eventually the broker didn't want to support Linux and I lost interest again.

My real problem is that I am very tired of MS and their total disregard for performance and efficiency, and want to be running something that runs well doing things *I* want, not buried trying to do things I don't care about.

So here I am, testing distros, trying to see if I can find one that I like working with...
This particular machine is

wattOS R8
Microwatt
HP DV9000 17" 1440x900 Laptop with webcam and touchpad
AMD Turion X2 64 about 2 ghz
NVIDIA 7150M Graphics
4 gb RAM
2 SATA drives, 250 gb Windows Vista + 320 gb various Linux distros
SD card slot - non bootable
DVD R/W
4 USB ports
Ext VGA Port (sometimes with 22" monitor)
WiFi
RJ-45 Ethernet
S-Video

I have older laptops, and will try it on a Dell Inspiron 8100 with 933 mhz Celeron and 512 mb with 20 gb drive when I get home.

I will also try it on my desktops once I have it working on the laptops, but they get tricky due to the 780i motherboards with triple SLI dual output PCI-E Video boards with 6 screens attached to each.  I also have an additional 4 screens (up to 4, but usually 2 per desktop) hooked via eVGA adaptors off USB ports.  I don't know if I can get those to work on Linux or not, but will give it a try.  There are 18 screens total in the array, usually 2 to 4 of which are driven by the laptops, and the rest are divided between the desktops.

I'm not exactly sure the reason.  I was able to install gcc ok, but I won't find out what other development related things I will need until I run into them when I try to install something not already packaged up for this distro.

So far, my impressions are quite good of the distro itself.  The things I like most are that its using a very current kernel and xorg, and that it seems to run pretty light out of the box.  I'm hoping to lighten it more for my old clunkers and see if I can get a menu generator working for it.

thanks for any help...