Sharing one SWAP partition with multipal distros of linux

@CALLmeABC

Why don't make use of virtualization? By using VirtualBox, Vmware (Player or Workstation), KVM, XenServer, etc... you can hae as many Linux Distributions as you would like. You could run all of them inside of your current OS installation, which will use the same swap space as the others. The running Virtual Machine will use it's own swap space from within the VM, over all still using the same swap space. No dangers for you to have to worry about, and you can run more Linux Distributions if you make use of the dynamic disk technology. This allows you to create a 40 gb virtual hard disk that will only consume physical hard drive space in the amount of the used virtual disk. Ie a 40 GB virtual disk created in dynamic disk mode with CentOS 6.3 (minimal install) installed will only consume 3.5 GB to 4 GB of physical hard disk space.

You should have an adequate amount of RAM, no matter what.

As a safety precaution you should always retain backups of anything you feel important enough not to lose.

Ryan

Not a good idea. If your system crashes, linux uses the info in swap to recover, which works very nicely -- as long as you don't use the same swap for more than one system. If you use suspend to disk, swap is necessarily used. With todays huge disks, the small amount of space used by a swap partition is negligable. If you are really worried about disk space you can reduce the size of swap to just a little bigger than real memory, which would still allow recovery from a crash, or restrore from suspend-to-disk.

The swap space is only necessary in case you run out of RAM. Normally it is not used for permanent storage of data. I say normally because when using the "suspend" feature instead of shutting down the PC copies a complete RAM image to the swap space. When booting a different distro this might lead to troubles (haven't tried yet).

However, when avoiding "suspend" you should be able to use the swap space with as many distros as you like.