Partition recommendations

[Infected]

I have a 10 gig hard drive with 256 megs of RAM and am going to install Mandrake 8 (again) with Windows 98. I'd like to give Mandrake a 4 gig partition, but I'm not sure about the swap file or if I even need one. Can someone give me some recommendations?

Thanks in advance :)

[fancypiper]

With that much memory, I don't think you need a swap partition. You can create a swap file if you want without a separate partition for it.

[solo]

I think a good rule of thumb is to assign about twice the amount of RAM for a swap partition (up to 256MB). I read that it doesn't really help much if you have more than 256MB for swap; except for applications that need more (like CAD software, or other data intensive apps).

[twofoolish2b]

I think it's always a good idea to have a swap partition. My computer has 512MB of RAM and I always make a swap partition around 256MB. If you don't make a swap partition or if you make one to small you can always make more swap space, like this:

This makes a swap file of 128MB in directory /opt.

cd /opt
dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=132207
chmod 600 swapfile
mkswap swapfile
swapon swapfile
edit /etc/fstab and add this line
/opt/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

[Infected]

Thanks :)