Its a passion.

Downloaded the Ubuntu 11.04 Beta. It didn't act like the Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1 or 2. Thought I would be smart this time and let it do the upgrade. That was a good long downtime. Got Ubuntu 10.10 loaded up, again. Downloaded Gentoo 11. That was 18 hours in downloading. It is a 2.3 gb file. It burned wonderful on a 4.7 gb DVD. I just started at 2 pm yesterday; Worked a 8 hour shift on third and Came back to another hour and a half wait. Have no idea how to install it. It is real cool.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=1

Had to use Ubuntu to load the install pages. This time I booted into Gentoo. The pages came up this time. My Internet is operatable in Gentoo. Gentoo isn't installed yet.

I kept going back to Ubuntu. But along the way I found a good use for my Omega 250 Zip Disk. You can setup the disk as a swap space. No matter what Linux distribution you are using it acts as booster when the OS loads up. I figured that since I kept going back to Ubuntu that I would just stay with Ubuntu. During the down times of loading up OSes I went back to watching television. I found it to be more enjoyable than watching the download. I found watching the download to be as enjoyable as watching wet paint dry.

I love how configurable linux is, but I don't think that setting up the 250 zip as a swap space is a good idea. I wouldn't even use a slow hard drive as a swap space - only a fast drive. Using slow storage for swap is likely to slow your system down to a crawl, when it needs to start swapping.

It could be the 4gb of DDR2 RAM that it really likes. Puppy Linux seemed to notice the difference when I was booting up. But then I loaded Puppy to the hard drive later. I did have the SFS loaded to the Zip Disk and at one time loaded to the two flash drives that were USB with one being 4 gb and one being 16 gb. I must say though that Puppy really like the USB 500 gb drive even better. At one time it was like completely lost in the one tb drive. Fedora 14 was pretty cool but ti didn't work well with .flv files for me.

Puppy apps are so small, with 4gb of ram everything can live happily in ram, barely touching any swap space. So with puppy you wouldn't even notice what a bad idea it is to use a zip drive as swap.

Fast flash drives as swap aren't so terrible, on usb 2.0.

If this means anything to you, swap area is kinda the same as the virtual memory when you are using windohs. Linux is so much better at memory management that swap (in todays beefy machines) can sit untouched in your linux environment.
If you want to hibernate your machine, you'll need swap space. If you want to catch a runaway process, swap space can be beneficial. If your machine has to start swapping memory pages, you want the device to be a lot faster than a zip drive!
Maybe use your zip drive for a common directory for downloads, documents or some such.
With all the hdd space you got going on over there, 16gb is a drop in the bucket for a reliable swap area... or grab a pos 20gb hdd and dedicate it to swap. Done!

"One small step for Major Distribution Linuxkind, One large step for Puppy Linuxkind."