during my recent distribution upgrade to ubuntu 11.10 i ended up needing 2GB of free space in /var. no amount of me deleting excess logs and so on was ever going to free up that much space. i had a lot of extra space on /usr so i decided to use gparted live to resize the partitions. normally, i would be cautious and backup my data just in case something went amiss. at the time though, i wasn’t much in the mood to do all of that. and i felt since i’m just messing with /var and /usr, the worst i could do is mess up my linux installation and all my personal data in /home would be fine (hopefully).

anyways, i proceeded with no backups and used gparted live to resize the ext4 partitions. the process was rather painless and the result was a success.