I don't know anything about Debian. If you're installing from a live CD (such as Gentoo, for instance), you can easily enable swap. You would first create the primary partition with
fdisk, then change its type to
82, then exit fdisk, and go:
Good luck buddy. I think that 8MB of RAM just isn't gonna cut it with current distros. 64MB is what you need in order to have a reasonably well functioning Linux or BSD system, I would think. But, I may be wrong...