My wife's laptop is slightly memory challenged. Years ago 256MB was a lot for a laptop. These days, KDE crawls on 256MB. I've got a 512MB flash drive and I thought to experiment with making that the higher priority swap device.
sudo swapon -p 31415 /dev/sda1
does the trick. The laptop is now much more responsive. It's not as responsive as it might be if it had 1GB of RAM, but it's much nicer. I've also installed xfce (this is kubuntu edgy, so I had to install xfce from debian repositories) and I'll test that out. It might be that I won't need to upgrade the RAM at all if the swap on flash plus xfce makes it less painful to develop. I'll need to convince my wife to switch to xfce though.
I've been an icewm nut for a long time but I'm tired of not being able to put things on the desktop, and having to edit the toolbar and menus by editing files. It's time to look at more featureful but still trim windowing environments. Long ago I couldn't stand gnome. I now use gnome though on my work desktop and my personal laptop. I might try to install gnome on this box too, although I don't have a lot of hope that it'll be much better than KDE.
For the moment though, swap on flash rocks. I don't care too much about the limits on write cycles to swap. USB flash drives are now so cheap I can get 1GB flash drives for only a bit more then $10, maybe I'll just buy 3 of them and throw them away as they wear away :-). Or my wife will, since this is for her computer :-).
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