On Tue, 1 Apr 2008 14:06:26 +0100, Mark Gary wrote
> I hope this question is relevant here in this group.
>
> I've just downloaded the Olivebsd CD, to try it out on my Laptop.
> I've got a 500Mb free partition doing nothing. Can that be
> utilised as a swap partition to be used when the CD is running,
> or is it possible to create a swap file on a FAT32 partition(or even
> better, is it possible to use a windows pagefile which is not
> located on an NTFS partition?
>
> Note that my laptop is currently exclusivly used by Windows XP.
>
> Thanks
>
> Mark
1. OliveBSD is several years out of date; it is based on OpenBSD 3.8. 4.2 is
the current release, 4.3 will be released in 30 days.
2. I can't speak to OliveBSD, as I have never run it, nor looked at its
documentation. You can manually add any OpenBSD addressable partition or any
non-sparse file on an ffs filesystem as swap space via swapon(8) or
swapctl(8). However, OliveBSD may or may not not be able to boot if you have
insufficient RAM and no pre-configured swap space. You'll have to examine
OliveBSD's documentation for guidance.
3. The only default swap space -- by default, I mean not configured by the
administrator in /etc/fstab -- is the "b" partition of the boot drive, if the
disklabel has a "b" partition with a filesystem type of SWAP. Everything else
must be in /etc/fstab or manually configured.
I'm not as famous as OliveBSD, but I offer a set of about a dozen different
4.2-based OpenBSD LiveCDs and LiveDVDs -- they do not have any swap space
configured, and require a varying minimum amount of RAM to boot and run,
anywhere from 96-288MB of RAM.
If you were familiar with OpenBSD administration, you could boot one of my
LiveCDs or LiveDVDS into single-user mode, configure swap space on a hard
drive, then continue operation in multi-user mode, perhaps extending their
usabililty below these minimums.
OliveBSD may let you do something like that; or, it may not.
www.jggimi.homeip.net is the top web page if you'd like to take a look.
