Total newbie -- enabling swap after install (FC2)

adking · 07-14-2004, 03:40 PM

Hi guys,

I recently installed FC2, dual booted with XP, and for some reason Disk Druid wouldn't let me make a swap partition on install, so I made one later on with PartitionMagic. I have 512 memory, 1 gig swap partition, but I have no idea how to make linux use the swap.

I need swap to work both for root and other users. My RAM is full but no swap is being used. I've been using Linux for a while, but only at school so I have absolutely no depth of knowledge.

Thanks!

Andrew Benton · 07-14-2004, 03:54 PM

You need to add a line to /etc/fstab like

/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

change the hda5 to reflect where your swap partition is then as root do
mount -a

adking · 07-17-2004, 02:17 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Andrew Benton
You need to add a line to /etc/fstab like

/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

change the hda5 to reflect where your swap partition is then as root do
mount -a

ok... i did that, then i logged in as my general user, then ran a bunch of programs to fill my memory, but the swap still isn't being used.

so then i tried su'ing and i ran
mount -a
and
swapon -a

and the swap still isn't being used. my swap is a 1 gig partition, /dev/hda6, not that it matters, but it's still not being used!

Andrew Benton · 07-17-2004, 05:01 PM

Half a Gb is plenty of memory. Why do you want it to use the swap partition? Won't it slow down your system? Google on swappiness and do some reading.

adking · 07-18-2004, 11:28 AM

I tend to do a lot of scientific programming and right now I'm working on an application that takes upwards of 1.3G of memory -- obviously I have to stick to smaller instances on my home machine

I guess it's not really critical, but I'd like to know how to do it anyway.

ppuru · 07-23-2004, 01:35 PM

hope you ran

swapon /dev/hxxn where hxx is the partition you have created for swap (Partition type 82)

mugstar · 07-23-2004, 05:43 PM

Erm ... you're not happy that the kernels memory management is too good?