> 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?
"Recommended for efficiency" clearly means your installation is not
a time bomb, but may simply be less efficient than it could be. If you
have a lot of RAM space, it probably won't make a difference.
On a 128MB machine, it makes a significant difference.
The reason why it's inefficient is that you may have a lot of data in
tmpfs (or in some process) which is not actively used: if you have swap,
this data can be moved to disk to free up RAM for more disk
buffer cache. If you don't have swap, the system may end up thrashing
madly, constantly having to access the disk to read the next piece of
code to run, and then immediately hving to flush it from RAM in order to
make room for the next piece of code to run, ...
> 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.
Don't know what's DBAN, so I can't help you there.
> this (always have used guided partitioning before), I set one logical
> partition the size of the entire 14 GB free space - no swap partition, as I
> couldn't see where to add that in via the partition options during
> installation. Installation went great, linux runs perfectly fine, with 2
> primary partitions within the logical partition.
That's fine. You can also use files for swap (I find it to be a better
choice than separate partitions, because it's a lot more flexible), so
you can add swap without repartitioning/reinstalling.
Stefan
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