Dual boot newb question re: swap partitions
 

I have done a lot of reading... and some more reading... and some more reading, but I would like some help.

Scenario:

-Dual boot, Win7 & Slackware.
-Win7 already installed
-about 40 gb free for Slack and related partitions.

question is... can I relegate swap to a file location as opposed to a dedicated partition (i.e. /home/swap as opposed to /mnt and mtab). I have 8Gb mem, so how much swap if dedicated partition is "necessary" (I have read good rule of thumb is half of physical, but given space crunch, that seems a bit much).

sorry if this seems stupid, but I have read a bunch of howtos and man pages and cant really glean a definitive answer or feel. I am a total lin/Unix newb.


Thank you much.

yes and no, supposedly there IS a way to create a swap file as opposed to a swap partition, i have never tried and have no way of knowing it, but swap is not formatted in a traditional sense that can be mounted as a file system, so /home/swap won't work swap partitions are to some extent these days, optional, but i would use one anyway since disk space isn't hugely expensive. as for how much? well that's really up to you but i wouldn't make it any bigger then the amount of ram i had.

I should have been more elaborate. It is a laptop environement, and I am running on an 80gb ssd.... so the disk space is costlier than mechanical... and at a premium in such a rigid environment... 8gb of swap would deplete my /user /home storage.

Swap files certainly can be used. With 8 Gig of RAM you could get away without swap at all.
Unless you want to hibernate - depending on what software you use, that may require swap to write the saved memory image.