Resizing/Moving Extended Partition in GPartEd

Yesterday I was trying to setup my old laptop as NAS server and I was trying to setup my old laptop hard-drive (which I was using as portable USB drive) for NAS storage. That old drive still contained multiple partitions including one for Windows installation. I decided to delete windows partition and use it as root partition to install Ubuntu and use rest of the drive as /home for storage. So I created a bootable USB disk of GPartEd and boot my laptop from USB.

The issue came up when I was trying to move and resize my extended partition. One of the partition had lot of data that I didn't want to loose so formatting the whole disk was not an option for me. For some reason gparted was failing on moving my extended partition and it said that can not move/resize it. I googled for some help in various linux forums and found this post in Ubuntu forums about someone had similar issue. He/She tried 'swapoff' option on 'swap' partition and it worked for him. But for me, 'swap' was already in 'swapoff' mode. So no luck there.

Then I tried something new based on that, I deleted the 'swap' partition that was in 'extended' partition, applied all the changes. Then I tried to resize and move my extended partition and it worked!!

Once again, thanks Ubuntu Forums.

Using launchpad PPA behind proxy

I was trying to setup my Ubuntu VM in work machine and I was trying to install Chromium-daily build ppa from launchpad. I have global proxy setup in my account but when I tried to setup the PPA it was not working. So standard method

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:your-ppa

was not working. The alternative was to manually set repository and authenticate the repo via 'apt-key' as shown below:

Step 1: Add the repository via 'apt-add-repository' without authenticating its GPG key.

sudo apt-add-repository 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gwibber-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main'

Here replace the repository info.

Step 2: Authenticate the repository using 'apt-key'. First get the PPA key info from its web page. For Chromium-daily build the key is 4E5E17B5. Use following command to authenticate using http-proxy settings of your machine.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --keyserver-options http-proxy="http://your.proxy.server" --recv-keys 4E5E17B5

If things goes well then you will see a message from gpg saying 'Total number processed: 1' and you should be able to install your software from either Synaptic or Ubuntu-Software-Center.