Baslinux mailing list

[Stefan Güls <sguels AT gmx.net>]

Hi all!

 

I'm running a stripped down win98 side by side with a hd installation of BL2 on a 600mb harddrive, so diskspace is too little and inhibits the use of a dedicated swap partition for BL.

 

So I had the idea of using the win386.swp file (which can't be used by windows when running BasicLinux for obvious reasons) as a swapfile for BL.

First I configured windows to use a suitable minimum swapfile size, which ain't a bad idea anyway for fragmentation reasons. I added the partition containing the win386.swp to /etc/fstab  (/dev/hda[win-partition]  /hd vfat  rw,auto, ...) and put the lines

 

mkswap /hd/win386.swp

swapon /hd/win386.swp

 

into the rc.S script. ('swapon -a' didn't work... why?) . Voilá, what windows left behind as garbage is now reported as swapspace by 'free' in BL.

 

But again, the 'swapoff -a' in the shutdown rc.0 script does not turn off swap for /hd/win386.swp (???), thus hindering umount to unmount the windows-partition... an explicit 'swapoff /hd/win386.swp' in rc.0 worked.

 

Is there anybody seeing implicit dangers in doing so? Currently I havn't used so much memory under BL (even with running X / opera/abiword) that the swapfile was nearly used up. I can tell that windows doesn't care what happened to its swapfile after BL ran, but I can't foresee if BL might run into problems or harm the win-partition at some point. Any comments?

 

Greets,

Stefan