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!...

Most users up until now had only a single partition on their single rotating media disk in their personal computers. Common operating systems did not (and some still not) encourage their end users to organize their data into partitions in a different way. Naturally, this would be both an overkill and a mental overload for most users. However, an advanced user should not turn away from the possible benefits of restricted fragmentation and lowered seek times. Also consider the ease of backing up only the partitions that contain truly precious data. A few words about fragmentation. Most random access file systems today use block-sizes of discreet steps (sometimes only a single block size). External fragmentation is the physical discontinuity of logically continuous stored entities (files). Internal fragmentation is the overhead of this block scheme. Naturally if a file is composed of many identically sized, relatively large buckets, then most files will have some buckets that are not com...