Okay, I've searched ALL over for this, and I'm finally asking for help, because it's just got me going crazy...

Anyways. I've installed Slack 10.0 on a Thinkpad 600X (I didn't think this was so much a hardware problem so I didn't post this in there) that has a P III and 500mhz. I have 192mb RAM, and I've installed it as the sole OS on a 40 gig hard drive. I wanted to be generous so I gave myself a 2 gig swap (/hda2 I think).... and I read all the manpages on the addswap and mkswap commands, and tried doing all that in root....

I've been all over all the help forums, and I've practically whored google over this, and I just can't find out how to get my swap working! If I use too much memory (by the looks of things, the little status ticker for the memory in Gnome is always at the highest when this happens) it just crashes. Nothing moves, so I have to just shut it off and try again.

Any suggestions on what to do?

Thanks for any help,

Charlene

Post the contents of /etc/fstab. Usually during the installation phase of Slackware, you have the option for formatting both linux and swap partitions, and after it has done that, it autoamatically updates your fstab with your linux, swap, and other partitions that it sees, and so because of that , swap should always be turned on automatically each time you boot. Also, try just typing mount, and see what comes up.

2GB is probably a bit much for swap space, IMO. You could probably make do with just 256MB of swap space, or if you want to be generous, 512MB.

Anyway, assuming that your swap is on /dev/hda4 (that's where it is on my laptop), you need a line like this in /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda4 swap swap defaults 0 0

I looked and apparently I don't have an /etc/fstab file? Should I create it, and if I do, what should I put in it?

You're writing it entirely in lower case? You should have /etc/fstab. Easy way to check, try mounting your floppy drive or cdrom. Doesn't even matter if there's a disk in the drive, because the error you get will be telling of the problem.

If you don't have an /etc/fstab at all, then you've got more worrying problems. That's part of the etc package in the A set, and I'm not even sure if the install will let you not install that package. It's also modified by the install to reflect what it finds for your cdrom and floppy drives, and any other partitions you set up.

If you want to try resolving things by creating it, I can't tell you exactly what to put in there. It depends entirely on your system configuration and your partitions. FWIW, this is what mine looks like:

Sorry, I was a bit incorrect with my last post. I meant that it didn't show the "swap" listing in the fstab.

Sorry about the confusion.

And to find your swap partition name, try :
/sbin/fdisk -l | grep swap

Awesome. So it replied with this:
/dev/hda2 4682 4870 1518142+ 82 Linux Swap


What should I do with this information now?

Hopefully, you already figured it out from all the previous posts. If not, putting it all together results in,

Add the following line to /etc/fstab:

2gb??
I have a P2@400 and 256mb and I only have 128mb of swap, of which I have never used more than 65mb (and that running X with mathematica, firefox and thunderbird).

Ok I need some help with sawp also.

I have followed everything you people said but i have an issue. First I did /sbin/fdisk -l | grep swap and got /dev/hda6 9709 9728 160618+ 82 Linux swap so then I added
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0 to my fstab and then I did mount /dev/hda6 but then i get mount: mount point swap does not exist


What should I do now?

edit: I rebooted and it was loaded up

Accually, I rebooted my machine and swap is now working.

Thanks guy for posting some info because it helped me too

ok well I am making my computer work by doing updatedb in console and now my total memory is at 99% and my swap is still at 100% empty. Is there anything else I need to do, to get it working or how does the swap work?

Anybody? can anybody help?

bump

need some help still