the fastest linux and SWAP problem

[Mandrake72]

1.Which linux is the fastest if it runs on 133Mzh with 32ram and 1.5GB (only 500MB free)hard disk? Mandrake 6 ,7 or.. ? Stable is very importance too.
2.the swap size is never decrease. WHY?
my system config.
p3 500
128M ram 256M swap
mandrake7.2

[mdwatts]

2. Your allocated swap partition size is 256MB. The physical partition size will not increase or decrease as only the amount of swap space used will. Are you thinking as in the Windows swap 'file'? It is a file and increases and decreases dynamically when necessary.

[Strike]

1. There's no real "fastest" Linux (especially if you only consider Mandrake). The earlier ones are obviously going to be lighter and will probably run faster in general. But you could easily make the later versions run just as fast. The later versions probably have more hardware support built in, but since you have older stuff it probably won't make a difference.

2. Like mdwatts said, only I've always used a fixed swap size in Windows as well (just choose "Specify my own virtual memory settings" and then set the min and max to the same size).

[Mandrake72]

Ok! I know the physical partition size will not increase or decrease. My question is :
in kde control center, it always show 0% virtual memory is used and free swap memory is 256MB. Is it normal?

[bdg1983]

Linux doesn't have to resort to using swap very often in my experience.

[Mandrake72]

So I don't need swap partition because the used swap is never larger than 0%. Thanks

[wmHardRock]

You can't install if you don't have swap. Give swap 48 megs. And for distro question, if you need to use Mandrake, go with 6.0 or 6.1. If you can use other distros, try Slack or Debian as they are the lightest and the most stable (unless of course you use an unstable sources.list for Debian. I recommend using a testing one)