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I have an Acer Aspire One AO751H, and I've got two Ubuntu versions on it: 10.04.4 LTS Netbook Edition (which I keep around mainly because I really like the user interface) and 12.04.2 LTS. I have one primary and one extended partition, the former containing 10.04 alone, and the latter having 12.04 with its 2GB swap partition. My question is: will 10.04 recognize and use the swap space in the extended partition, or do I have to enable that? If so, what is the procedure for doing so? Any help would be much appreciated.

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  • Not quite sure what you meant by "will 10.04 recognize ...". Don't you already have both 10.04 and 12.04 installed? Anyway, how many swap partitions are there? If you haven't created the second swap partition, then the existing one is likely used. Check it by looking at /etc/fstab. Jul 21, 2013 at 19:52
  • There were two swap partitions initially, side-by-side in the extended partition with unused space between them. This was a legacy arrangement from a previous dual-boot arrangement with another Linux variant. I wiped out the unwanted OS and both swap spaces with the intent of creating two extended partitions, each with an OS and its associated swap. I didn't realize until later that you can't actually do that. So, I wound up with the setup as described in my question. Going to /etc/fstab now to fix it. . .
    – Hugh Logie
    Jul 21, 2013 at 20:51

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If the 10.04 is already installed, then the answer is no. It will not automatically use the swap partition. You have to manually add the partition to your fstab file. See the following for how to do that:

How do I add a swap partition after system installation?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#How_do_I_add_more_swap.3F (section "Activating the swap partition")

If the 10.04 is not installed yet, you can configure it to use the pre-existing swap partition during installation (you have to select the manual partitioning option to do that).

Important: be careful as the current implementation of hibernation (suspend to disk) in Ubuntu uses the swap partition. That means if you hibernate one of the installations it will write the contents of RAM into the swap partition, which may lead to problems if you start the second installation before resuming the first.

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  • Following the instructions in the links provided all the information I needed. Many thanks!
    – Hugh Logie
    Jul 21, 2013 at 22:58

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