I've got 1 gig of RAM on my primary machine, which I will be dual booting with Slackware 9.1. As I will not be doing intensive tasks am I required to make the SWAP partition for Slackware to work or will it just crash should I happen to run out of memory?

You don't need swap. It won't crash.

oh great now i have extra 500MB of disk space.

Thank you sir!

Has there ever been an official pronouncement from Linus or someone on the kernel team. THe last blurb from Linus was about 2.4.8 or so and he was still recommending swap.

/me wonders if there are programs in linux similar to Ramdisk (windows), which copies your swap into ram... should be fun

For home use, on that setup I could say that you'll never, ever touch your swap partition.

For servers, you might need some.

Anyway... if you're "afraid" of running out of memory, you might as well allocate some... say 128MBs worth of swap.

I run on 384MB RAM... and after about a year of running Slack, I've never hit my swap (256MB) at all.

Yes it is for home use and mostly I would be doing movies, small image editing (web images) music and web surfing. My main worry was that the install or the program would fail if it didn't see any swap, as I am used to windows stupid unnecissary requirements.

The install will not fail. If you need swap and don't have it, the kernel will start killing running processes on your system. As cheap as a couple hundred MB of HD space is..... it is up to you.

Until Linus says otherwise I will keep mine. I figure he knows more about it than .... well you get the idea.

I have no swap file on my laptop and run a lot of stuff (but not server). I have 640 MB of RAM with 64 given to video. I don't even come close to using all my memory. Right now am running XFCE with Mozilla, konqueror, konsole, and OpenOffice (one text, one spreadsheet) running. I am using 203 of 567 MB of memory.

Have you ran out of swap? And how much RAM do you have at that time? And on what kernel?

It won't "start killing running processes"... on the 2.6 series kernels at least, the pre-emptive scheduling feature is really remarkable.

To run out of RAM on 1GB on a machine which is for day-to-day home use is really impossible, unless of course you purposely want to find out how much pain your machine can handle.

I may not be Linus... but I also don't shoot my mouth off... And for God's sake, do we really need written/oral endorsement from him to do anything at all with Linux?

There is very little need for a swap partition on a home system.

And even on a server, I feel that if your server runs out of RAM and needs to use the swap, it is time to upgrade your memory. Swap is an emergency replacement to your RAM, your machine takes a serious hit in performance if it is using swap instead of RAM.

I have heard rumors that some programs would not install unless it detected a swap partition, but if that is the case, that software is broken in the first place, so it isn't worth worrying about (or installing).

I hope not - from what I hear, he doesn't even use Slackware

Even if you have HUGE amount of RAM the kernel will always be happier if it has a nominal amount of swap space. I think it's like Linus' security blanket!
To avoid having to have a separate swap partition you can create a small swapfile in /root
Even 512K will help your system, but have a heart and make it 8MB.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/swapfile bs=1k count=8192
mkswap /root/swapfile

The put this line in fstab
/root/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

This is one of the most useful swap info that I've read in a very long time (and it's not from Linus at that , heh... sorry, can't resist).

Thanks for sharing it with us.