Quote Originally Posted by jacksonon
I'm running knoppix on a very old old computer.

P3 900mhz
128mb ram
Geforce 4
No Harddrive - except for external which from time to time is removed and used for other things


Now the system is fine expcept that it doesn't have enough ram.

I can use the external harddrive as a pageswap/virtual memory? If so how?
You should mount the external drive (smb, sshfs, etc.) create a swap file dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/mounted_partition/swap.dd bs=1M count=300 (300 for 300M of swap space), the mkswap /media/mounted_partition/swap.dd and swapon /media/mounted_partition/swap.dd.

You can use a very fast usb drive as well but the continuos writing will short the life of the memory.
It is possible to create a swap partition in the external drive but I suppose that you don't want to repartition the drive.
Ram is faster, swap in dedicate partition is fast, swap in a file is slower, swapping in a file in an external disk is more slower.
Cheers

Max