RE: Swap partition and fdisk
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From: A R Abid[SMTP:aa2g+@andrew.cmu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 1996 3:45 AM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Swap partition and fdisk
I have got 16MB of RAM on my machine. Could someone tell me if it would
still be necessary for me to create a Linux swap partition. Also, would
Linux fdisk wipe out my DOS partition even if I only want to create one
Linux partition w/ Linux fdisk and not mess up w/ DOS partition using
Linux fdisk. Thanks.
A. R. ABID
aa2g@andrew.cmu.edu
Well...in my opinion 16 Meg is not enough to justify nuking your swap, but then I tend to run some fairly memory intensive stuff (X with xv, povray, and NExS). I've just upgraded to 64 Meg from 32, and I'm tempted to try running with no swap now, but I don't think I'd feel fully comfortable unless I had 128 Meg or more. Then again, maybe I'm just a whiner. :-) Back when I had 16 Meg, 'top' would show me using anywhere from 4 to 20 Meg of swap while running X and all the goodies. With 16 Meg you don't actually NEED a swap partition, but given my druthers I would say, give yourself about 32 Meg of swap, check out your usage with 'top' on a regular basis, and if you find you're not using it, back up your drive ,re-partition without a swap file, and then restore. Of course, that is a lot of work, but as Hicks said in Aliens 'it's the only way to be sure.'
Regarding fdisk, so long as you don't actually DO anything to your DOS partitions, (ie: just make some new partitions on another drive, or on the free space of your boot drive), you shouldn't have any problems. I dual boot Win95 and Linux all the time with never a problem.
This is just my $0.02 Hope it helps.
Rik Ling
Network Administrator
Peterborough Internet Pipeline.
http://www.pipcom.com/~rling (under construction, as always)
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