newbie question about memory

Hi. I am a database prorgammer and I work on windows/MSSQL or with
small MySql databases 90% of the time, however on a project that is on
the way now, I have to use PostgreSQL on Linux; moreover, I need to
configure the server.

So, as I was figuring out the amount of memory on the server that I
can grab for db server operations, I stumbled upon an interesting
thing.
According to cat /proc/meminfo, I have 2 Gb of memory and 500Mb are
free.
Now the database is very big, but it's not operating it, so I was
surprised to see such a high memory use.
I checked ps -eo user,comm,%mem, and memory percents total to about
1.2% 0_o I see a lot of fancy labels in meminfo output, cached, etc,
but I cannot figure out what they mean and google seems
uncooperative :)

I have two questions
1) Where did the memory go?
2) Can it be freed e.g. can I safely assume that I have 1-1.5Gb for
PostgreSQL to roam free?

.

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