bkil vs. programming

A default clean install usually doesn't fit me. However, I've installed Ubuntu LTS just like that on this machine when both were new. It has a small but fast SSD. It has been working flawlessly until now. I've recently reconsidered that I could use a bit more space. From experience, I never had a need for swap, as I'm using zram . So I've decided to simply delete the swap partition. Of course, solving it simply was only my dream. Technically, you need to delete the swap partition, optionally move middle partitions to the end, expand your root file system and be done with it. I've first made whole disk backups. I've booted off a flash drive containing Ubuntu 12.10. Deleting the partition with GParted was a breeze, as well as marking the rest of the needed operations, move and resize. But there was a catch: it bailed out with a cryptic message halfway. (I think it was "GNU Parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working on it!...

I had to revert from compressed BTRFS to Ext4 on my tiny netbook partition, as it wasn't playing nice. That's a pity, as Ubuntu is highly compressible and compression didn't slow it down. The system occupied less than half of the space and reported such, however when I was starting to fill up the space, it complained of insufficient space. Probably because of metadata allocation. As I didn't want to reinstall the system, I went the more costly route: * I've rebuilt the partition in an image on ext4, * copied over the data * copied the initrd image from another computer of mine with the exact same system, both were updated at the same time - otherwise it couldn't read the new kind of partition * adjusted grub settings * reinstalled grub (was extra painful when I attempted to do that inside an image..).