Swap

[Michael <michael_six@users.sourceforge.net>]

How crucial is a swap partition?  The only think I know of it  being 
used for is virtual RAM memory, am I wrong?  Having 896 MB of RAM I 
didn't think that I would need one, but I can either use the 512 MB 
chunk I left free for that, or make another larger partition available, 
if this list of people more knowledgeable in Linux than I, recommends it.

After I re burnt the iso to a regular cd-r and reinstalled Woody, the 
installation went smoothly, and I got X-Windows, gcc, gnome, kde, and a 
bunch of other goodies installed!  I am still unable to connect to the 
internet and don't know why, I have used pppconfig and pon, with no 
results, and wmdial, I think was the other one, which just kept 
initializing the modem, and not doing anything else.  I will keep 
searching the man pages for those, and I am starting to realize how much 
easier it is to configure this stuff on a system you put together 
yourself, then trying to guess at the preinstalled hardware.

startx doesn't connect, but that doesn't surprise me after an earlier 
post I read about it, and I have the 4.3.0 sources downloaded, so I may 
try and compile that instead of using the 4.1 that debian installs.

How different is the debian kernel than a regular kernel?  for instance 
if I just wanted to download a newer kernel's source code, how much 
hacking would I have to do to get it compiled?

But the Swap thing is really the only question I have at this point, So 
any and all suggestions are, as always, much appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
--Mike