The gist of my problem, every time I enable swap (via GParted), it's disabled upon reboot.
I'm running Linux Mint 14 x64 on my netbook. However, it only has 2GB of RAM. I thought that would be enough, but it has locked up on a few occasions from running out of RAM (<insert Flash rant here>). I was reluctant to use swap because I have a SSD (64GB Crucial M4), but now I figure I should have at least a small swap.
I have an extended parition containing, with an 10.38GiB EXT4 and a 512MiB swap (the rest is unallocated, unformated space). Again, swap is disabled everytime I reboot. What is interesting, though may not be related to the root of the problem, is my swapiness setting does survive (I set it to 10). Could someone help me enable swap permantly? Enabling it every reboot is a pain...
Did you partition manually, and how? If you use LVM (logical volume manager) for your partition, there will be no swap partition, but that doesn't mean there is no swap.
Could you post your /etc/default/grub and etc/fstab, than we can see some of what is happening.
Did you encrypt the SSD? If so you'll need a bit of extra config to make it work with LVM because of the logical sequence of things at startup.
I manually paritioned with GParted, and no encryption on the SSD. I did play around with Arch, so it's possible I screwed something up there. I think I may have spotted the problem.
UPDATE: So I realized simply quoting the contents doesn't work well, so I uploaded it to google (both files are in ZIP archive).
So, fstab contains a UUID for swap, maybe it changed? Just look at the UUID's of all your partitions and AFAIK you can use swapon because it adds the appropriate entry into fstab.
+1, what wickedwig says is the only thing that makes sense for the problem you have, the swap is in fstab so it's on the system as long as that UUID is valid, and swapon will use the correct UUID for the fstab entry automatically, as grub doesn't block any UUID's from being passed to linux. If your UUID is correct, than you always have a swap volume.
as an unrelated sidenote, you should also add the "discard" parameter to your ext4 volume in fstab to enable trim for your ssd.
Alrighty, sorry for the delay, but I haven't been using my netbook lately. Turns out that the UUID was the problem. Fetched the updated UUID for my current swap partition from GParted and updated my fstab accordingly. Upon reboot, I have swap. Thanks for the help! Really appreciate it.
I also added the discard option. I'm actually amazed I hadn't arleady done that. I usually do that upon installation.
I do have one last question that's unrelated, but I'm too lazy to start a new thread. Will my SSD use my unallocated, unformatted space as over-provisioning?