I was one of the early adopters of the Asus EEE PC–one of the original Netbooks. This model, the 901, features two internal drives. It’s a bit of a weird setup: one measly 4GB drive, and one 16GB drive. Both are solid state (obviously).
Does anyone here remember their first (external) hard drives? Most were a tiny fraction of 4GB.
In any event, this time around, I decided to avoid setting up swap space when installing the latest version of Ubuntu on it (Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6, NMR edition). The reason is simple. It’s kind of silly to allocate swap space a priori in most cases, and it makes even less sense having to decide which drive to put it on for this model.
So I decided this time around to create a swap file instead of the usual swap partition. I already knew how to do this, of course, but I searched Ubuntu and came across this nice FAQ, which covers how to add more swap after installation (search for How do I add more swap? on the referenced page). I’ve also used this trick to add swap space to a “slug” (the NSLU2), which suffers from many of the same challenges as early EEEs. So I hope everyone finds this to be useful. I’m almost finding myself wondering why most OS installers don’t create the swap file instead. Among other things, it would give folks a line in /etc/fstab that could be copied, should there be a need to add more swap space.
You might be saying, “I don’t need swap space.” Think again. Unless you are planning not to use hibernation (suspend to disk), you’re going to find that you need it. So I hope this posting will help others!
Surf’s up!