No swap partition!

[SamuelFigueroa]

I would appreciate people's opinion about this. My home computer has 8 GB of memory and no swap partition.

What happened was that I ordered a brand new $60 chassis so I could put my very old computer in it. When I received it, I found it already had a motherboard and a power supply. At work, I found a dual core 1.8 GHz Pentium, memory, and a video card that nobody needed. I happened to have an extra 120 GB drive apparently from my previous work. I ordered an extra 1 TB drive to back up some of the other computers I have at home. I installed Windows XP Pro on over half the 120 GB drive and copied the data from my old computer.

I then proceeded to install Linux Mint x64 on the remaining free space. (I read a post in which Linus Torvalds recommends using a 64-bit kernel if you have over 2 GB of memory.) I was presented the choice to reduce the NTFS partition size on my 1 TB drive, or use the entire 1 TB drive, or partition manually. Since I wanted to install on the 120 GB drive, I chose manual. I was thinking perhaps I could have a swap partition on the 1 TB drive along with /tmp, neither of which would be backed up. (The 1 TB drive is strictly for backups, so it should not contain data that needs to be backed up.) However, I did not find an obvious way to safely split the 1 TB partition, which was already in use.

To make my long story short, I decided to forgo having a swap partition on the grounds that if I had 4 GB of memory, my swap partition would probably only be 4 GB in size, so 8 GB of memory would be enough to not require a swap partition. I did use the memory test program to verify the entire amount of memory is working fine. I don't think I'm using memory-heavy apps - just web browsing, e-mail, listening to music (I have an external D/A converter and a very nice vacuum tube amp and speakers connected to my home computer), and Windows XP running in VMware Player (which I configured to actually use the physical partition on my 120 GB drive, the same one that I can boot directly into). I may create a couple other virtual machines, but they will be even smaller than Windows XP. I don't envision working with videos - I'll use one of several Macs we have in the house for that. I may copy a few photos, but not hundreds like my kids have on their Macs.

So do I actually need a swap partition? If so, how would I go about creating one without reinstalling Linux Mint?

[mick55]

So do I actually need a swap partition?

No. Unless you wish to use the "suspend to disk" or "resume from disk" features (hibernation)
Obviously you will be able to "suspend to RAM"

If so, how would I go about creating one without reinstalling Linux Mint?

You can shrink an existing partition, create a new partition in the unallocated space,
format as type 82 (swap) and add an entry for it in fstab as below

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/dev/hda?       none            swap    sw              0       0

Or you could create a swap file with the "dd" command and enable it
with the "mkswap" command as below.

Create the swap file : ( 8GB )

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dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=8388608

Setup the swap file:

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mkswap /swapfile

To enable the swap file:

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swapon /swapfile

To enable it at boot time, edit: "/etc/fstab" (sudo gedit /etc/fstab)to include:

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/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

The next time the system boots, it enables the new swap file.
Verify it's enabled by running one of these commands:

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cat /proc/swaps

or

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free -m

hope this helps
mick