[parabolize]

Yes you want a swap partition. How large depends on how much ram you got and how much processing power. You usually want twice your ram.
You usually don't need to recompile the kernel though adding non-free graphics modules is pretty normal (aka nvidia driver).
Almost none of a debian (ubuntu) install is source though all the packages have source available in the repositories. Other distributions are called source based and install/compile everything from source like Gentoo.