I run k/ubuntu on two differnt boxes one with a gig and one with 1.5 gigs of ram. I don't run a swap partition on either of them. It has never caused any problems and will full on eye candy, even while running World of Warcraft, and never have I had any problems. As far as I can tell, with at least a gig of ram there…

I second XMAN714 with anapod explorer. The single best software purchase I have ever made, they are also very prompt and helpful with activation issues as I reformat rather often while messing around with various linux/osx86 distros. Granted since I went full fledged rockbox I don't really use it anymore.

Yakuake is great, there is also a skin for it that fixes some problems it has with transparency and tabs if you run it in gnome rather than KDE