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Neil Williams wrote:
Now, one question. If I install Slackware, Debian, Lycoris, etc. on this 3Gb, can they use the EXISTING swap partition (now hda7) or do I have to do more fiddling with diskdrake and create another swap partition? After all, only one Linux distro will be running at a time.
You can have multiple installs of Linux share the same swap partition, for as long as you run them one at a time. (Theo I assume user space Linux allows multiple Linux instances to share the same memory/swap ??) If you surf around you'll even discover you can have Windows put it's paging file on the same partition, but I think you have to arrange for it to be formatted each time Windows boots or some such. If you have enough memory in hardware, swap is kind of an unnecessary waste of disk space these days. Working on big HP-UX systems, you'd be amazed at how many people religiously follow the old rule of thumb and have 1.5 times as much swap as physical memory. Some of these systems have 4GB+ of memory, and 6GB+ of properly redundant swap is still quite a lot of disk space to lose on systems that may only want to run a small Oracle instance in memory. Says Simon with 400MB of swap, 128MB of memory, and only 9MB of swap in use. Large swap space was more important when OSes would swap whole processes out at the drop of a hat (like Cray C90's did - no virtual memory on Crays as virtual memory requires an extra level of indirection, and that would slow you down). These days *nix machines need to be in severe memory trouble before they would even consider deliberately swapping out a whole process, these days aggressively paging data to disk is the norm. Of course getting people to call it "page space" not "swap space" will never happen. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.