Re: swap space on DSL ?

On 6 Nov 2006 09:43:21 -0800, surf staggered into the Black Sun and
said:
I installed Damn Small Linux to an old PC with 32M RAM

Hope you don't need to do much. 32M isn't enough to run anything but
the lightest of modern apps, and everything will be *slow*. Just
starting Netscape 4.7 on a machine with 32M took ~45 seconds back in
2000. Things have not improved much if you need a GUI or "normal"
end-user apps.

Apparently I need swap space to make it all run adequately. However,
one of the disks (hda1)

hda1 is a partition, not a disk. Did you mean hda?

shows up in cfdisk as having all of the space [used]. I can mount the
other disk, but it is still [in] the old dos format. How can I
repartion [hda] under cfdisk without blowing away the install?

Resize the filesystem(s) from a rootboot CD, then repartition. You
don't sound ready to do that, though, and there are other problems with
that approach.

[Or] how can I put swap on the other drive?

dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/swapfile bs=1M count=128
(creates a zero-filled file, size 128M, in /path/to/swapfile)
mkswap /path/to/swapfile
swapon /path/to/swapfile

....then create an fstab entry like so:

/path/to/swapfile none swap sw 0 0

NOTE: That entry must be after the entry for the partition where
/path/to/swapfile lives.

I googled around a bit, but it's not clear what to do.

Keyword "swapfile" would've told you what to do.

The install did not give me any options for partitioning ...

Weird. Oh well, see if you can get by with a swapfile. And don't
expect too much from this ancient machine.

--
Love is a snowmobile racing across the Arctic tundra that suddenly
flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the Ice Weasels come.
--Matt Groening, "Love Is Hell"
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
.

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