Does Mandrake (or any distro for that matter) really need the SWAP partition in order to work? My understanding of SWAP is that it is used in the event you run out of RAM and the system uses the SWAP as virtual memory. Is this right or am I all #$@**! up here. If that IS what the SWAP is used for and you have more than enough RAM to handle everything, do you need the SWAP partition?

Hey, what can I say? I'm new. Gotta learn somehow.

Thanks,
freezinbutt

When you put it like that, then I s'pose you could do with out the swap partition, but that is not to say that Mandy would not use SWAP. In the even of not having a dedicated swap partition, Mandy does a very Windows type thing and uses a swap file on the current partition (I think - that's certainly what it looks like to me, although I could be wrong).

You do, however, have to ask yourself: Do I really, really, absolutely need, and couldn't live without, that extra 100-200Meg of harddisk? I certainly don't miss it out of 41Gig.

Yeah, your right. I thought the same thing; am I really going to miss the couple hundred meg. Not really. I was just wondering if it was totally necessary in order to install Linux. I have 512MB of RAM and I doubt that Mandy will strain my system that much that the SWAP will come into play (at least I hope not). Heck, maybe it will. It's got a lot of bells and whistles, and B&W's take up lots of memory.

Anyway, I was just wondering..........
freezinbutt

I didn't have a swap partition for the quite sometime in RH and I had no problems at all. I set up a small (100 mb) swap now and i don't really recgonize much difference.

So what you actually planning run to run under Mandy??

Not planning on running anything special at this time. I'm new to Linux so I need time to see what is out there. I was just wondering if the SWAP partition was really needed in order to do an install. Sounds like it really is not. There has to be a reason for everything and I wanted to know the real reason for the SWAP partition and what it does.

freezinbutt

Historically, when computers routinely came with like 8 or 16Mb RAM, a swap partition was necessary for multitasking (and multiuser) environments because not much would fit. Many books on Linux still recommend that SWAP=2xRAM, even taking into consideration that it's not too uncommon for people to have 256+Mb RAM. Mostly, you won't need more thant about 100-200Mb SWAP.

Unlike Windows, where I once went to a 3Gb SWAP file. What was I doing? Trying to load about 100 Jpegs (all 1600x1200) into Paint Shop Pro at once! But we're not gonna go there: this question is about SWAP, not ms v linux.

You can always create a swap file and use it instead of swap partition...

I know in some flavors of unix, the OS likes to make sure there is enough swap available for whatever it's doing in the event that it should need it. I don't know if this is the case with Linux or not, but why chance it?