Few questions before I try to install Ubuntu

[Eric Dunbar]

On 20 Feb 2006 11:01:09 +0100, Matthias Heiler <heiler at gmx.de> wrote:
> "Eric Dunbar" <eric.dunbar at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On 2/19/06, Thilo Six <T.Six at gmx.de> wrote:
> > > Boyan R. schrieb am 19.02.2006 17:23:
> > > > My 160 Gb HD is divided in 6 partitions. First four are occupied,
> > > > but fifth (5 Gb) and sixth (2.7 Gb) are free (currently both in fat32).
> > >
> > > This is together 7,7GB.
> > > As long i use Ubuntu my swap was used max. 10MB if even that.
> > > (384MB RAM).
> > > Swap comes in handy if you are going to try s.th. like suspend to disk
> > > or if you are forced t boot from a Live-CD.
> >
> > Boyan, in your e-mail you mention that you have 512 MB of RAM. This is
> > more than enough RAM for most operations, particularly if you're just
> > "fooling around" to see what Ubuntu is like. Since it's enough RAM for
> > regular operations, your swap partition will see relatively (very)
> > little use. You can safely keep it small (e.g. 256 MB).
>
> Most workstations we run at work have 2GB of RAM and are continuously
> (i.e., over weeks and months) being used.  *Many* problems with
> seemingly random crashes simply vanished when we enlarged swap space
> from 1GB to 5GB.
>
> So, in my experience, being generous with swap space pays, esp. if you
> are not shutting down the system every few hours.  (The rule of thumb
> "swap size = twice RAM size" seems reasonable.)

In this case it doesn't really matter. The original poster (OP) was
looking to play around with Ubuntu. In my experience, GNU/Linux will
happily "play ball" with as little as 0 MB of swap and perform quite
well with that amount of swap ;-).

However, if you're looking to use it regularly and for real work,
then, yes, I could see utility for having a significant swap
partition.

For the OP (Boyan) it probably won't matter if he's running a 64 MB or
1024 MB swap since he's only got 5 GB to play with. Unless he's going
to be doing crazy things having a small swap (e.g. 200 MB or 300 MB)
will allow him to sample this particular GNU/Linux and get a
reasonable feel for performance (unless he gets into opening up a
whole slew of GIMP files ;-).

And, if he's going to use Ubuntu for real work, then he'd be better
off repartitioning his drive to give Ubuntu a larger partition anyway.

Eric.