No swap area - Do I need 1?
Forum: HD Install
Topic: No swap area - Do I need 1?
started by: dsquared
Posted by dsquared on Sep. 27 2006,18:47
I have installed DSL 3.0.1 on my hard drive. 
The machine is an old AMD400 K6, with 256 mg of ram & 20 g on 2 hd. It is a dual boot Win98 /DSL box. There is no swap area reflected on the system and everything seems kind of slugish - for instance the DSL firefox seems to consistently take 3 times longer in loading the same web sites & adding a second tab does not show up right away - shouldn't I have a swap area? I could set one up but how do I go about getting DSL to recognize and access a swap area?
Posted by dtf on Sep. 27 2006,19:14
When you partition your disk, I use cfdisk you assign a partition to bea swap partition.
Say you choose to make /dev/hda2 your swap partion (the partition
type number is 82 (I think I am remember correctly)).
After you are done with partitioning your hard drive and write it out,
you need to run mkswap /dev/hda2 and swapon /dev/hda2.
If you forget the swapon command you will have a swap partiton
but it will not be used.
Edit: I would suggest a minimum of 512M for the swap partition.
Posted by newOldUser on Sep. 28 2006,15:55
If you don't have room for a swap partition you could always try using a swapfile. Somewhere on this board there is a thread about using the Windows swapfile for a linux swapfile. That way you will not be taking up any additional space.
Posted by sheldonisaac on Sep. 28 2006,22:49
| Quote |
If you don't have room for a swap partition you could always try using a swapfile. Somewhere on this board there is a thread about using the Windows swapfile for a linux swapfile. That way you will not be taking up any additional space. |
From my /opt/bootlocal.sh
| Code Sample |
mount -t vfat /dev/hdb5 /mnt/hdb5 mkswap /mnt/hdb5/win386.swp swapon /mnt/hdb5/win386.swp |
Posted by Zucca on Sep. 28 2006,23:41
Hmmm. I could create a script that automatically searches for those *.swp files...You guys need one?