Changing swap size and installing more memory

[zasten]

Hi All,

I'm a newbie and made the jump to gentoo about two weeks ago... no more windoze on my pc! I am very impressed certainly an improvement form running mandrake.

Anyway thats not the subject of this post. Lets get to it!

When I installed gentoo I made the swap partion 256 MB as I have a rather old pc with 128 MB ram. I came accross some more ram and I now want to change the size of my swap partition. I tried to emerge QTparted (a front end for parted that resembles partition magic) but it failed at some point, but I still have parted installed.

My Question: What is the best/most newbie friendly way of resizing my swap partition?

Here is what my partition table looks like...

Disk /dev/hda: 13.0 GB, 13030907904 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 25249 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 125 62968+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 126 622 250488 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda3 623 25249 12412008 83 Linux

[tumbak]

i believe u can specify more than 1 swap partition, so if u make some free space in the end of the drive u can use

[yngwin]

You don't need to enlarge your swap partition. 256MB swap is more than you will need in normal use. Also, the rule that swap = 2 * ram is old school, a relic from years back. Once you have more than 128MB ram, you do not need more than 256MB swap. I myself have 512MB ram with 250MB swap, works a charm. Swap often doesn't get hit at all, and I've never seen more than half in use.

And yes, you can make more than one swap partition. Check out man mkswap.
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