HD Install :: No swap area - Do I need 1?



I have installed DSL 3.0.1 on my hard drive. :cool:    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?
When you partition your disk, I use cfdisk you assign a partition to be
a 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.
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.
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
Hmmm. I could create a script that automatically searches for those *.swp files...
You guys need one?
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