There is no real benefit of using a designated hard drive partition for your swap. You can just use a file, with the benefit this swap space can be temporary or permanent. So if this is a new system or you just need a bit more swap memory for a while, it is very simple, this is what you do:
[1] su -
[2] dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap1 bs=1M count=1024
[3] mkswap /swap1
[4] chmod 600 /swap1
[5] swapon /swap1
bam! that's it. so here it what just happened...
[1] log in as root
[2] create a 1 GB swap file in /swap1
[3] set up a Linux swap area on the file /swap1
[4] set permissions so users can't try reading sensible data from the swap file
[5] start using the swap file
If you want this file to be used for swapping across reboots (permanently), then enter the following line in the /etc/fstab file:
/swap1 swap swap defaults 0 0
If you finished the memory intensive task and want the space used for swap back, then use the following command:
swapoff /swap1
Happy hacking! :)
