Set up swap drive after install?

[JPgirl]

Can it be done?
Apparently I neglected to do so during installation.
Can I do it without installing it again, it is painfully slow without it
I'm running on an 8 yr old thinkpad with 192mb of ram!

If it can be done, can someone walk me through it?
Total newbie here!

I have an 10gb drive with 2 equal partitions, puppy is on the first partition and mepis is on the second, grub is installed to the mbr and loads both.
I would use puppy it was pretty good on my laptop but while it was a tad faster than windows it was a little too buggy for my liking so here I am with mepis.

[MikeTbob]

Do you have any free space left on the drive?
All you really need to do is use the fdisk command to create a new partition, then use the mkswap command on that partition, activate it with swapon /dev/path/to/new/partition
Here is a howto for Redhat, which should work just fine for any version of Linux.
Adding Swap Space

[JPgirl]

Ok I think I understand all that.

One question,

Could I use the partition that puppy is on as my swap for mepis as that partition is not in use when I am in mepis, and If I can get mepis working nicely I will not likely be using puppy anyway.
Or does the swap drive need to be completely and totally free of anything else?

Yes I do have space on both partitions, if I have to have a totally free 'drive' I would have to resize partitions to add it though.
So I guess I am asking could I just use the mkswap command on the partition that puppy is on and skip the step of making a new partition. They are all on the same physical drive anyway.

[MikeTbob]

If you create a swap partition, it needs to be free space only. Anything else will get overwritten when you create swap space on it. If you have a swap space that you use for Puppy Linux then you can also use that same swap space for Mepis. I share one swap partition between 3 distro's.

[jayd512]

Your other option would be to create a swap file. It's just an ordinary file configured to to be used as swap space.

*EDIT*

I read that all wrong... somehow I missed the fact that the link MikeTbob posted was a walk-through for what I just suggested.
Please ignore me now...

[JPgirl]

ahhh ok, I see it now.

Thanks Mike, and Jay!