Here is how I created more swap space on a Linux machine that has one
hard drive dedicated to Linux (as well as I can recreate from my notes).
Be aware of course that you are mucking with your disks and seriously
bad things could happen...You would be smart to google around a bit on
increasing swap space for your particular system.
I have a Fedora 9 machine that uses the LVM disk format.
1. Apparently you cannot just move space on your hard disk from the main
Linux partition to your existing swap partition. Instead, you must
reduce the size of the main partition to free some space, and then turn
that freed space into a new, second, swap partition.
2. I installed and used "system-config-lvm", a graphical disk management
tool available as an "Admin tools" package on Fedora. I reduced the size
of the main partition (normally, LogVol00) by selecting that
partition, clicking on "edit properties", and simply reducing its size
by 300 extents (about 9.4 gigabytes). It takes a while for
system-config-lvm to finish this step, presumably because it is checking
for any files that need to moved.
3. Still in system-config-lvm, I created a new logical volume (in my
case, LogVol02, which is system file /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02), setting
its size to the amount of space freed up in the previous step. Just
select the Volume Group and click on "Create new logical volume".
4. Now you need to tell the operating system that this new logical
volume is swap space. You can follow the instructions for setting up the
swap partition at:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-Manual/custom-guide/s1-swap-adding.html
I did two things:
a) Use the command "mkswap" to turn the new partition into swap space.
For my system, I did:
mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02
b) Edit the file /etc/fstab to add a line telling the system about the
new partition when you boot. For me, it was:
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02 swap swap defaults 0 0