You can always create a swap file to add more swap space. This is not the same in every aspect as swap partition, but it will be easy and dynamic.

In the following steps, change /media/fasthdd/swapfile.img to anything you like. For example, it can be /swap.img as well. /media/fasthdd/swapfile.img is just an example filename. If you are using this one, then of course there must be a directory /media/fasthdd/ with enough free space for your new swap file.

Use any terminal application to run the commands of the following steps. All commands should be run with root privileges. To do this, you can either add sudo to the beginning of every command or run sudo bash before running the commands.

1. Create an empty file:

   
   

   This file will contain virtual memory contents so make file big enough for your needs. This one will create a 1GiB file, which means +1GiB swap space for your system:

   
   

   dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/fasthdd/swapfile.img bs=1024 count=1M
   
   

   
   

   If you want to make a 3GiB file, then change count value to count=3M. See man dd for more information.

   
   



2. Bake the swap file:

   
   

   The following command is going to make a "swap filesystem" inside your fresh swap file.

   
   

   mkswap /media/fasthdd/swapfile.img
   
   

   
   



3. Bring up on boot:

   
   

   To make sure that your new swap space is activated while booting up computer, you should add it to the filesystem configuration file /etc/fstab. Add it to the end of the file. This is recommended because other filesystems (at least one that contains a swap file) must be mounted in read-write mode before we can access any files.

   
   

   # Add this line to /etc/fstab
   
   /media/fasthdd/swapfile.img swap swap sw 0 0
   
   

   
   



4. Activate:

   
   

   You can either reboot your computer or activate the new swap file by hand with the following command:

   
   

   swapon /media/fasthdd/swapfile.img
   
   

   
   

If everything goes well, you should see that more swap space is available for use. You can use the following commands to check your new swap and confirm that it is active:

$ cat /proc/swaps

Filename                           Type       Size    Used    Priority

/media/fasthdd/swapfile.img        file       8388604 2724    -1



$ grep 'Swap' /proc/meminfo

SwapCached:         4772 kB

SwapTotal:       8388604 kB

SwapFree:        8355812 kB