Re: Using USB memory key as boot directory for older computer?

On Thursday 28 June 2007 13:01, Jon Pruente wrote:

Nope. Swap is not needed. It can help, but I've run systems with 512MB-1GB of RAM with no swap, with no issues. It wasn't long ago that most systems had 256MB of swap+RAM total. Having actual RAM is better than swap. Swap is there to make up for not having enough physical RAM. RAM is cheap nowadays, so the need for swap is greatly reduced.

Not quite. No matter how much RAM you have, swap is still a good idea (though of course not technically required). Some times it makes more sense for Linux to swap out a program so it has more RAM to cache files in. If you have no swap, it can't do that.