Hey everyone,

just some quck questions because i think that my swap isnt working (im really a newbie)

1) how do you check if your swap is working
2)i know a swap partition exists so if it isnt working how do you enable it

thanks in advance
jack

1) swapon -s (status)
2) swapon /dev/hd?? (substitute applicable partition)

"man swapon" for edification

run gkrellm and you can monitor swap usage.my swap isn't being used,but that's a good thing.it simply means my system has enough ram to not need it.

If you have a lot of ram, swap may not be used by your system.

ok this is whats still confusing.

when i shutdown the computer and watch all the text when linux is shutting itself down im pretty sure i see on the left hand side where it says shutting down swap then over on the right hand side i see "missing" in red.

when i did swapon -s it said /dev/hdb5
and swapon /dev/hdb5 told me device was busy
and when i tried man swap it said "no manual entry for swap"

I also have a monitor program on my desktop so i can see how much memory and swap is used and ive never seen it used on this installation and i know it should have because i purposely multitasked with gimp, mathematica, open office, and many more.

i have 512mb of ram so i im pretty sure i should have used swap space when multitasking because when i had 9.2 i did use it in similar situations

thanks

Post your /etc/fstab. What partition is your swap?

i have 512mb of ram...a gig of swap, and my swap is never touched...

hda is entirely windows, hdb has fat32 parts because each OS can write to it (newbie cant leave windows yet)

/dev/hdb6 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hda2 /windows/D vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
/dev/hda5 /windows/E ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdb7 /windows/F vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
/dev/hdb8 /windows/G vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
/dev/hdb9 /windows/H vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
/dev/hdb5 swap swap acl,user_xattr 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/dvd /media/dvd subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0

thanks

could there be any problems with the swap being on the extended partition instead of its own primary?

thanks

No - this is looking like a Suse problem. See also this thread.

thank you very much

As far as I remember I got that message a couple of times too. But only at shutdown and not always. I think it is more valuable to know if swap is set-up on boot. Try 'dmesg | grep swap' to see if swap has been activated.
Is this the case, I wouldn't worry too much about the shutdown message. BTW: It's 'man swapon', not 'man swap'