I used this page to set up my n800 to boot from the internal mmc. One thing it told me to do was to create a 400mb vfat partition. I went ahead and made it a 512mb partition. Low and behold by the end of the tutorial I find out it isn't being used for anything. I should point out that I don't need a vfat partition for windows compatibilty because I don't run windows on any of my PCs. I'm also having trouble getting the virtual memory tab in the control panel to let me create virtual memory because it thinks I don't have an internal sd card. Can someone help me kill 2 birds with one stone and set up the unused vfat partition as a dedicated swap partition? That would make me uberhappy.

Thanks in advace!

The typical Linux way would be

1. Partition
2. Format a partition with mkswap
3. Edit the /etc/fstab file to indicate that the swap partition should be activated during boot
4. Then reboot (not necessary, but you want make sure everything still works )

However, the it seems like OS2008 ignores the /etc/fstab file. So, I'm not sure what the best way to automatically activate the swap partition is. Running a boottime script that calls "swapon" should work, but there may be an OS2008 equivalent to /etc/fstab, which would be a more elegant solution.

Yeah I had gotten that fat before I read your post. bummer about fstab, thats the way it should be handled. I found some blog posts on the subject but they are really old and for the n700 and it's original OS. I've written a script that activates the swap, but I dunno how to run the script automatically at boot.

ooh i fixed it. Gotta softlink to my script into /etc/rc2.d/S99-local-mmcswap.sh If anyone else has this problem, that there is the solution. Now the only problem I'm having is that whenever I boot I get a dialog saying "Memory card corrupted or not formatted" Can I turn that off?

Yes you can. By creating VFAT partiton as the first partition on your card

And then you can create swap file on it :-)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/mmc1/.swap bs=4096 count=32768
mkswap /media/mmc1/.swap

Maybe it even gets autodetected and used. If not, you can enable it in startup script too. As for filling the space - FAT is good enough for media (or any data) files.

What I did was take the memcard out of my n800 and put it into a memcard reader. I then loaded it up in gparted and added a small 16mb VFAT partition in the front, and moved the 512mb swap partition to the end. Had to modify my swap script to point to partition3 now and of course I am wasteing 16mb of vfat but I'm okay with that.

I intend to leave a VFAT partition on the front of my 16 GB card for MM maps, music, etc; it'll be easily available to both installs, and also available over USB with any computer (Linux or Windows, as I have to use both), for backup and file dropping purposes.