Mark:
>
> Question 1: In the Debian manual it says a swap partition isn't needed but
> recommended for efficiency. Anyone else installed without swap and had
> success? Is my installation a ticking time bomb if I don't have a swap
> partition?
I ran my previous laptop with 768MB of RAM for several months without
swap. That never was a problem. But I don't run Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice
or any of those applications that require inordinate amounts of RAM on a
daily basis -- except for Firefox, of course. ;-)
The worst that can happen is that you get an out-of-memory-situation
more easily. Then, the kernel's "OOM killer" will kick in and kill a
process of choice (usually the biggest memory hog). This means data loss
if the application had important information in memory that haven't been
saved to disk yet.
> Question 2: I've had recent clean Lenny installations on DBAN'd disks hang
> at "activating swap file" upon boot up, where I needed to force shut down
> the computer. Without the separate swap partition this isn't an issue, so
> is this the right solution? These are completely fresh installs with no
> other OS's so I can't imagine the swap partition being corrupt.
Even if it is, this shouldn't happen. But you would need to provide more
information for us to analyze the situation. To answer the question
whether going without swap is the "right solution": I wouldn't call it a
solution, instead you chose to evade the problem. (Which, of course, is
fine.) Whether it is a "wise" decision depends on the amount of RAM in
your system and how you use it. For a regular desktop (Gnome, KDE etc.)
I would recommend at least 1GB RAM when you want to go without swap.
I am running a more or less "slim" system with awesome as window
manager, Firefox, xfce4-terminals and a few Gnome daemons, but 'free'
still shows a memory usage of almost 700MB (w/o filesystem cache).
I am currently playing with the thought to get rid of swap, too. No
matter how hard I try, I cannot find a use for my 4GB of RAM. ;-) The
only thing that keeps me from doing that is that I might decide that
I should look at suspens-to-disk some time in the future (this is a
laptop).
> Thanks for any input. This was actually for a Ubuntu install side-by-side
> with xp, I hope this doesn't break any mailing list rules so I apologize if
> it is considered off-topic.
Some people get annoyed when Ubuntu users ask Ubuntu-specific questions.
Some people get annoyed when Debian users ask general linux questions
which aren't strictly Debian-specific. I belong to neither of them, as
long as it's somehow applicable to Debian.
J.
--
I often play sports / do exercise.
[Agree] [Disagree]
<http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html>
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