I have an 8GB flash drive ($30 from Micro Center), which is devided into 2.86GB and 5.0GB partitions. The first partition contains an install of Pendrive Linux 2008 (~800MB), which includes a loopback file of ~250MB for the sake of persistence. The distro allows me to adjust the size of the loopback file for storing a larger number of changes and/or software installs. What size would be good for the loopback file? I was thinking of allocating ~1024MB or so, so that I'd still have some space available for swap. OTOH, I'm using this on my work laptop, a Lenovo T43 with 2GB of RAM, so a swap file may not even be necessary. What do you all think?