Partitioning for Kubuntu

[logan01]

Prior to installing Kubuntu, I made 3 partitions; root, home, swap. When I open Dolphin, under Devices are listed New Volume, Windows, my root partition and my home partition; no Swap. Out of curiosity I did a little research thinking it was inside either Root or Home (can you tell I don't know this stuff?). During the research I ran across a little ditty about Swap. It basically indicates there are 2 methods to create the Swap area, one being preferred over the other. I believe mine is not the preferred one though I don't know that as fact. http://askubuntu.com/questions/50887...is-a-swap-area

1. Why does Swap not appear under Devices w/ the other two?
2. What's your opinion of the info in the included link?
3. Does it really matter?

Thanks

[Qqmike]

You can either make a separate partition for your Swap Area (recommended), or you can go the windows way and make a Swap File on your system partition (not recommended).

You did it the preferred way. And the usual and standard and normal way. I mean WE did it.

[Qqmike]

run this command:

sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda

Partition Code 8200 is a swap partition.

[Qqmike]

run

lsblk

it won't be labeled swap, but you'll see that separate partition you made for swap

[Qqmike]

run

sudo blkid

and it shows a separate swap partition

[Qqmike]

as for this thread, you may get tons of philosophy about the need for the swap partition and/or its size.

[logan01]

as for this thread, you may get tons of philosophy about the need for the swap partition and/or its size.

Ok, just make sure you answer all them.

[elijathegold]

1. Why does Swap not appear under Devices w/ the other two?

A swap partition is never accessed by the user, just the kernel so you never need to worry about it. As others have said, you can see the swap partition using other tools. Don't worry about it, leave it alone and let it do it's job.

2. What's your opinion of the info in the included link?

Not too bad. Swap space should normally be based on how much RAM you have you have in your system.
The general consensus seems to be:

• Double your RAM for 2GB or less.
• Equal your RAM up to 4GB.
• 4GB for any more RAM than that.

The exception to the last rule depends on whether you will want to use a hibernate function. The swap area is used for that so you will need at least as much as you have RAM.

A swap partition is definitely better that a swap file as it is less likely to suffer corruption and is quite a bit faster.

3. Does it really matter?

Does it matter if you have a swap area? Definitely! The way the Linux kernel works it likes there to be a swap partition even if you have 64GB of RAM and it never gets written to. Counter-intuitively, not having a swap area may actually slow things down although given the speed of computers these days you might not notice too much. You can tune Linux so that it is "less aggressive" in it's use of swap which may give a small performance enhancement in certain circumstances.

[oshunluvr]

Another way to see if your swap is there:

swapon

shows you swaps and size, amount used, priority, etc.

free

shows it too...

[logan01]

I only have 4 GB on this laptop. I made Swap 8 GB. I meant does it really matter which of the 2 ways to do the Swap partition. Thanks. Crap, I forgot to do all of Qmike's todos. Let me do those now.

[oshunluvr]

A swap partition is faster and preferred in most cases.

[logan01]

Another way to see if your swap is there:

swapon

shows you swaps and size, amount used, priority, etc.

free

shows it too...

here's what I just got (and thanks):
richard@richard-HP-15-Notebook-PC:~$ swapon

Usage:
swapon [options] [<spec>]

Options:
-a, --all enable all swaps from /etc/fstab
-d, --discard discard freed pages before they are reused
-e, --ifexists silently skip devices that do not exis
-f, --fixpgsz reinitialize the swap space if necessary
-h, --help display help and exit
-p, --priority <prio> specify the priority of the swap device.
-s, --summary display summary about used swap devices and exit
-v, --verbose verbose mode
-V, --version display version and exit

The <spec> parameter:
-L <label> LABEL of device to be used
-U <uuid> UUID of device to be used
LABEL=<label> LABEL of device to be used
UUID=<uuid> UUID of device to be used
<device> name of device to be used
<file> name of file to be used

[logan01]

Just ran all the others.

[oshunluvr]

Odd. Maybe it's not enabled or forammted. Here's my output

stuart@office:~$ swapon
NAME      TYPE      SIZE  USED PRIO
/dev/sdf2 partition   8G 40.1M    1
/dev/sdg2 partition   8G 40.1M    1

Do you know which partition number it is? Is it in your fstab?

Use Mike's command to find out:

sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda

[logan01]

Results from "free".

ichard@richard-HP-15-Notebook-PC:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3934964 1595992 2338972 123516 77176 821180
-/+ buffers/cache: 697636 3237328
Swap: 7812092 0 7812092