I just installed eeebuntu on my Asus 900 (16 gb). I haven't had a long time to work with it, but so far I think it's awesome. I did a lot of reading before I installed eeebuntu, and several folks said that a swap partition would wear out the SDD faster. How big a deal is that? I noticed when I did the guided installation, a swap partition was created. I didn't know enough to try to do a custom installation. I have also read that with a ram of 1gb or greater, a swap partition isn't really needed. Any opinions on this?

Way overstated as a problem I would think. If you don't need to swap you won't use it - simple. And with a Gig you probably won't do any.
"swapon -s" will tell you how much swap you have used - "uptime" will tell you how long since you booted. Use these numbers to work out the rate at which swap is writing to disk.
I'll bet it is zero - or pretty damn close.

I don't know how eeebuntu is structured, but if /etc is on that disk, logs will be a much bigger issue.

Swap space makes your RAM work way better, but if you're really paranoid about it, people have success with swapless systems. Just go root and run

where 'blah' is your swap partition.

But really, it's no big deal. That's like saying that driving wears the asphalt away. Technically true, but what else is it good for?

If you have RAM enough you do not need a swap partition.
Do not use hibernate function in this case.
If you like to turn of you're swap well edit fstab and make the lines about the partition as a remark .
If you need it later on you can make it active again

SSD has a rough amount of writes it can handle before it more or less dies. Modern SSD cards last a reasonable while, though this still happens.

Why does this make any difference you may ask- swap is where data is stored when it needs to be popped from RAM to add more data to the RAM; data that has a higher priority or need in RAM. This happens more often as memory levels drop- so a machine with a couple GB of RAM will need swap less than a box qith 256MB if you understand.

The problem? Yes, less swap may mean fewer writes happen because it may fill quickly, but it'll still happen; not to mention the fact you need swap working in tandem with RAM for performance, means states can be preserved here instead of having to generate them again from data and processor.

Edit: I misunderstood a key detail about Asus 900 and wrote a wrong answer. (This forum ought to let you delete your own posts).

Thanks to all of you for your answers. I did check the system monitor under swap monitor, and it doesn't appear that any swapping is going on. I think I will leave the swap partition alone.

I think if swap was used on a regular basis then it could wear out a SSD, but as this doesn't really happen, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Technically you don't even need swap if you have at least 1 GB RAM.

The only time my machines swap out is when editing large images, other than that swap is never used.