I don't think you can use search operation with apt-get. 'aptitude search' should work though.

Neither does Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandriva and many others. They already have their default choices and configurations for software in the distribution. And you can test drive many of them before starting to use one.

"why didn't you just put the swap file on another drive completely? " As far as I know you have to have the pagefile on the %systemroot% in order to get crash dump in Windows.