>> 1) Does NetBSD REQUIRE a swap partition?
> I think so... when compiling anything, it will require swap space...

Well, that depends.

NetBSD per se does not require a swap partition.  I've run NetBSD
machines without swap partitions often enough.

However, on a low-memory machine, you do *in practice* need swap, even
though it's not a theoretical requirement.  This is simply because the
total VM available is RAM plus swap, and lots of things require more VM
than a small machine has RAM.  NetBSD deals rather badly with running
out of RAM+swap (which means running out of RAM, if there's no swap);
semi-random processes get nuked and you get "killed: out of swap"
messages on the console.  (This is, strictly, port-dependent, but a
quick sampling of a half-dozen ports finds it in all of them, including
macppc.)

But if you've got, say, a gig and a half of RAM, then no, you quite
possibly have no need whatever for any swap space.  But I don't recall
enough context to know what the original machine's RAM load was like,
if that was ever stated.

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