Understanding the 'swap'.

While installing Ubuntu 10.10 Ubuntu 10.10 - the Maverick Meerkat , you surely would have had to reserve some area of the disk for 'swap' . But what is this 'swap' ? Here it goes: Swap is that area of the disk which the operating system ( kernel ) uses to store active processes before calling them again for running. This is actually a part of the switching process that happens in a multiprocessing environment. Check the status of your system's swap by typing ' free -m ' at the terminal.