is a linux swap partiton on the hdd equal to ram? or how does that work, it says "make a swap partiton" when you don't have enough ram, i have a 32stick and i want to run kde which requires 128...i have another 64 stick, so i have 96...i have two hdd's one being 6gb another 4gb, i would so make the 4gb just a linux swap parition if it's like ram ors omething...

yeah and i have an old 1998 emachine that's 366mhz, have 32mb ram now, hopefully adding 64 soon, what distro would be ideal? will knoppix 3.8 be fine to install? what suggestions

it's not "equal" at all... it's like a windows pagefile. relative to ram is slow and annoying. more like any port in the storm. you'd only want a swap of say 200mb max. that box is never going to be able to much that would use up a load of ram.

most distro's would install fine, but you're never going to get kde or gnome running in a worthwhile state.

yay. what was that last bit? "that box is never going to be able to much that would use up a load of ram"

Think of it this way.. swap is only used when its needed. It's virtual memory on disk and it's a good sign your memory is doing a good job when swap is not being used. You'd be wasting disk space if you made a 4GB drive as swap.

You can run Gnome or KDE on this box but it will be slow. You'd be better off running a more minimal window manager or desktop, like XFce, WindowMaker, Blackbox, Fluxbox or the countless others out there..

thank you good sir, i was googling and yeah that's what i got, i actually ran blackbox on that pc awhile ago, i didn't like it, i like the more graphical interface like gnome or kde, so my problem is ram, i have another 64 stickkkkkk, so 96 mb of ram would run faster obviously, still wont be like it is when i'm running on my windows machine with 700+mb of ram, thanks for the suggestions, well..out of the ones you mentioned,. what have you tried, and what do you like about it?

I think you should look at all screenshot, but XFce is probably the best choice. It just looks simplar to KDE or GNOME. Seen screenshots here: http://www.xfce.org/index.php?page=overview&lang=en

OoO i like it thanks <3 i will check it out