Swap space on Ubuntu

Had to compile Qt on Ubuntu virtual machine running on Win XP. Compilation used to fail repeatedly for QtGui component with the following error:

collect2: ld terminated with signal 9 [Killed]

With not much error information, I was clueless on what was going wrong!

Google’ing this error resulted me to learn that swap space reserved was too less (or not at all reserved?) which was required for Qt compilation.

Then tried using the swapon utility command to check how much swap space is already reserved:

sudo swapon –s

Found that nothing was listed at all!

Executed the following commands to create a swap space of 512MB.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/512Mb.swap bs=1M count=512
sudo mkswap /mnt/512Mb.swap
sudo swapon /mnt/512Mb.swap

This reserved 512MB of swap space, which solved my Qt compilation issues.

reference : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq