Create a 1 GB file to swap to (we have sufficient space on / on this machine. Use a different partition if necessary)
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
If you prefer 2GB swap, chose count=2048, 4GB: count=4096
Change permissions of swap file:
sudo chmod 0600 /var/swapfile
Set up swap file and enable it:
sudo mkswap /var/swapfile
sudo swapon /var/swapfile
You should see your swap space now:
thomas@machine:~$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7700 7655 45 0 75 1237
-/+ buffers/cache: 6342 1357
Swap: 2047 0 2047
If you want to make the changes permanent add those lines to /etc/fstab
/var/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
