system not swapping

[Eric Storch <estorch gmail com>]

I am not sure why but my system is not swapping.

When I run swapon -s it shows:
Filename                                Type            Size    Used  
 Priority/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01         partition      
2031608 0       -9

When I run free -m it shows:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1003        986         16          0         81        450
-/+ buffers/cache:        454        548
Swap:         1983          0       1983

The really odd thing here is when I open a terminal i get:

bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
bash-3.00$

How can I force the kernel to swap?
uname -a shows :
2.6.11-1.27_FC3 #1 Tue May 17 20:27:37 EDT 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
any info is good info, and thanks.