Linux tips

I am and will be very short of time for a couple of weeks, so most probably these will be the last posts for the month.

If you've read and followed my advice on re-creating the swap partition after failed hibernation, there is one caveat I discovered: after recreating, the swap partition is not automatically mounted. This can result in sever system instability and programs crashing very quickly due to their inability to allocate memory. To verify that your swap partition is mounted, fire up a console and execute the free command (thank you my Linux guru friend). If on the last line is says Swap: 0 0 0, you have a problem. Fortunately remounting the swap partition does not require reboot, just execute (from a console): sudo swapon -a. Also, check after the next reboot if the swap partition got mounted (just to be sure).

Also, if you're short of disk space and want to follow my advice on deleting crash dumps, be sure to also check under /var/crash, which is an alternative place to store crash dumps as I discovered. You need root privileges to delete files from here, so if you want to remove them, do a sudo rm /var/crash/*.