On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 10:49:05AM -0700, Prashanth KS wrote:
> Guys, I would like to know where the swap file (not swap 
> partition) of Linux resides. 

There is NO swap file per se. A disk file can be used as a
swap device (seel LOST #207 below), but is NOT a mandatory
pre-requisite of any Linux distro.

> This is because my friend had installed RHL 7.3 on a box 
> with 256megs ram and had made only a 256 megs swap part-
> ition. 
> 

This is more than adequate for any  workstation under any
workload. It will hardly be used with 256 mb  of  RAM  to
play around with !

> He eventually screwed his grub and lilo and had to  re-
> install his boot loader thru the CD.
> 

What he must have damaged is his MBR ...  You do not need 
both grub and LILO to be installed simultaneously to do a
boot/ multi-boot. What was on the MBR ?

Unlike M$ boxes, boot loader is not inserted by  the boot
CD. The LILO/ grub info is placed on the MBR or the first
sector of the root partition at installation. 

If he has made boot floppies at the time of initial inst-
allation, that is the best to use, because  the  disk  is
customised for his set up. The kernel is to be pointed to
the root file system with rdev. The kernel on the  insta-
llation CD may not.

If his initial MBR was LILO, all  that  is  needed  is to
boot through the boot floppy for the box, go to /etc  and
check up that lilo.conf is okay ... then issue command:
#lilo -v

> During  this  he was prompted to make a swap file as a
> result of insufficient space in the swap partition and
> by mistake he clicked  on next.  Now the upgrade never
> competes  and  quits by saying  "Insufficient space to
> build RPM database".  This  message occurs whether the
> "Customize packages" option is checked or not.
> 

What he has done was to start  the  installation process
all over again, probably in "upgrade" mode. He has skip-
ped the swap initialisation step ....
 
If he has not done more than what you state, the  rescue
floppy will sort things out ...

HTH

Bish

--
:
####[ GNU/Linux One Stanza Tip (LOST) ]#######################

Sub : Adding a swap file                             LOST #207

If you want to add 64mb swap file temporarily:
1.  dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/swapfile bs=1024 count=65536
2.  chmod 600 /path/swapfile
3.  mkswap swapfile
4.  swapon swapfile OR
5.  To /etc/fstab add: /pathto/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

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