Few questions before I try to install Ubuntu

[Matthias Heiler]

"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.)

  Matthias