[ale] few requests

[Glenn C. Lasher Jr.]

On 27 Dec 2001, Jim Philips wrote:

> > ** if your running linux off a cd you dont need a swap
> > partition right?
>
> I wouldn't bet on it.

The fact that you are running from a CD has nothing at all to do with
whether or not you need a swap partition.  The swap partion needs are
based on how much RAM is in the machine vs. how much you actually need to
run the apps you run.  In most cases, on most OS's, the need for RAM is
more than the available RAM.  The swap partition is a place for the
computer to throw things that it thinks it doesn't need immediate access
to, and gives you some "virtual memory."

When running Linux from a CD, you actually exacerbate the problem, because
chances are that you are either using a root in RAM (which will consume
some RAM) or an overlay filesystem (which caches writes to a CD) in RAM.

You can, however, create a swap *file* as opposed to a swap *partition*,
but it needs to be on a real device, not in RAM, or you will have missed
the point.  If you have a HDD that is holding the primary OS and running
Linux off a CD as a secondary, you can mount the host computer's HDD, then
do this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=[filename here] bs=1024 count=[kbytes here]
mkswap [filename here]
swapon [filename here]

Next time you do this on that same machine, you can omite the first two
steps, unless the file got deleted.

-- 
glasher at nycap.rr.com
After 163 days, Verizon still couln't deliver Telocity DSL.


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