DISCLAIMER: The post you are about to read is really boring unless you are a geek like me. You have been warned.

So, I’ve been trying to tune my Kubuntu installation the best I can, scrounging what is left of my unreliable mobile connection. I managed to actually finish doing apt-get dist-upgrade on it, but by the time everything is installed I came across another problem: hard drive space.

I initially setup my virtual machine to have a 4GB hard drive. After a full installation of Kubuntu Koala Karmic, I got around 600MB of free space on it. So, I went ahead and did a full upgrade, after which my free hard drive space immediately dropped to below 100MB. Oh yay!

That said, turned the VM off and tried to edit its settings. I added an extra gigabyte to the existing 4GB virtual hard drive, then booted into Kubuntu again. Oh darn… I forgot that resizing the virtual hard drive merely simulates an increase of physical hard drive size, and to make use of this I had to actually resize the darn partition.

Next, I got my old Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon CD, which I finally found after digging through a pile of old movies and stuff. I launched the live session, got into GParted, and attempted to resize my root partition.

Then another hurdle: GParted could delete my existing extended partition (which contained my swap partition), but when I tried to resize my primary  partition it failed. It says something about the superblock being corrupt, whatever that means.

So I tried doing a workaround: I built my extended partition again, only this time covering the entire free space. I then added a new EXT3 partition and kept my swap at a meager 256MB. Then I tried to boot into Koala Karmic again, and voila, it booted.

But this doesn’t solve the problem that Karmic Koala keeps warning me about low disk space. I can actually tell it not to warn me anymore, but the fact that I only have 120 megs of space in my root partition bothers me. I wouldn’t be able to install pretty much anything…

OK, let’s try this again. Boot into Gutsy Gibbon, and try to redo the partitioning (again).

*By the way, I gotta tell you, booting a live CD takes forever! Using a bootable USB stick is probably a better idea.

Nope. It just won’t do it. I guess Gutsy Gibbon is a bit old to do its trick on newer Kubuntu installations. I’ll just have to wait to get that Kubuntu installation DVD…