Sonya command line shuffle to increase root partition?

[anarchosaxophonist]

I have very recently installed a working LM Sonya Cinnamon system on a home built computer. Unfortunately, I didn't allocate enough room for the root partition as I only have 600 MB remaining. As I ran into some GParted weirdness during my install (disks reported different /dev/sdx than the disk formatting tool in the installer), I would like to shrink my /home partition by 5 GB, reposition swap without changing size, and increase the root partition by 5 GB using the cli. Is there anyway that I can do this by way of a simple command or script? Note that this is a working system that I am referring to, so I of course want to maintain everything in both /root and /home as is. I just need a 5 GB larger /root partition. Anyone have a suggestion about how to implement this shuffle? The problem appeared when I wanted to install a program that requires at least 1 GB of free space in /root.

[fabien85]

First thing, you must be speaking of / , not /root
/ is the root of the filesystem, i.e. what contains everything. Programs are usually located in /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin or /opt
/root is the home of the admin user, there is usually nothing interesting there, e.g. on my computer there is just an empty Desktop/ folder:

Code: Select all

$ sudo ls -R /root/
/root/:
Desktop

/root/Desktop:

It's quite possible to resize your partitions, but you can't be booted on the system that uses these partitions. Would be like trying to move a house by pushing on the walls from the inside.
You have to boot on the live USB (or DVD) that you used to install Mint, then launch gparted to resize the partition.
- select the good device in drop-down list on the right
- select the partition then Partition > Resize/Move
- then it should be self-explanatory. you will probably need to decrease the size of some partitions and move some others, in order to have free space contiguous to the / partition and be able to grow it