You don't have to use a swap *partition*. You can use a swap *file*. Just dd some space from /dev/zero to a file like /swapfile and then use mkswap on the file.  Then you can activate it with the "swapon" command.


Kenny McHenry wrote:
From what I have heard swap space isn't necessary like you were saying. In netbooks they aren't using swap space, because it reduces the strain put on the solid state harddrives that have a finite number of read/writes before they go bad. I'd say that as long as you have enough memory in your computer you would be perfectly fine with running without swap.

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:45 PM, Stephen <cryptworks@gmail.com> wrote:
I understand that swap is not as critical anymore with machines now
having 2, 4, and even larger amounts of Ram available. but aside from
being able to allow a more graceful recovery of a runaway process. how
needed is swap in a desktop machine?

reason i ask is I'm getting ready to try and cram a 3rd partition on a
macbook pro and the EFI boot schema it has can only deal with 4
partitions, but mac OSX has 2 of those and i have XP Pro in there as
well. and if i include swap space i will be at 5 not the limit of 4.

--
A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen