Back in February I wrote about installing Linux Mint 6 on my Acer Travelmate 290 laptop. One problem I had was that I had used a small 20 GB hard drive for the installation. Initially it was only an experiment, but I liked it so much I continued to use it, and couldn't be bothered to re-fit the 160 GB hard drive that has Windows XP and Open Suse 11 on it.

 When first installed I only allocated 4 GB of space for the root partition.  This should have been enough, but I found that when I tried to install Open Office, and then tried to do some updates, I managed to completely fill that 4 GB. At the time the simple solution was to delete Open Office, and all the excessive international dictionaries etc. that went with it. Now I find it would be useful to have Open Office installed on it. 

 The long lasting solution to this disk space problem is to fit a bigger hard drive, and I could replace Open Suse Linux on the 160 GB hard disk with Linux Mint 6, but as an interim solution I decided to try and resize the partitions on the 20 GB hard disk. For this I used the terribly handy (and of course totally free and legal) gParted. The live CD version of gParted is a stand alone hard disk "manipulator" similar to Partition Magic, and just as easy to use. It comes with a full graphical interface, and just about everything is done using the mouse.

 I decided that I would move the bottom of my /home partition up by 2 GB, shift the swap partition up by 2 GB, and finally extend the root partion up to use the empty space. Once I clicked on "apply" it took at least half an hour to run (maybe more like 45 minutes). I think I could have made the process slightly faster by deleting the swap partition, and making a new one rather than try to move it.

 Once it had finished all the moving I asked it to do one more error check on the root partition before rebooting and trying the results for real. Happily it has all worked out just fine. I had plenty of space in the root partition for all the Open Office stuff, and plenty of room for updates and, if I want, even more applications to be installed. The home partition still has plenty of space for all sorts of things unless I was foolish enough to attempt to put my entire mp3 collection on there. Even so, I do have a couple of hours worth of mp3s, and a couple of movies stored on the now smaller home partition. I am sure that someone, possibly someone famous, said that the amount of stuff you need to store on a hard disk is proportional to the size of the hard disk. If It wasn't someone else that said it, it must have been me !