[ale] fun fun changing Linux swap partition to a swap file

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 13:22 -0500, Ron Frazier wrote:
> By the way, the man file for resize2fs says it cannot resize an ext4
> file system online, but that could be out of date.

Ah, looks like the manpage has not been updated to talk about ext4.  It
says that only ext3 can be grown online; ext4 can also (it is a natural
extension from ext3).

> PS - Disk Utility does not ask for a password to start up, whereas
> Gparted does.  I find that interesting. 

Disk Utility is pretty well integrated into the current permissions
policy system (which I think is called PolicyKit).  I'm way, way out of
date on some of these infrastructure-type things.  gparted, on the other
hand, runs with root all the time.  Disk Utility will ask for
authentication when you attempt to do something that requires
authentication.

In case you're interested, this works by Disk Utility (and other
programs that support this mode of operation) actually being a
multiprocess application.  One process runs as the normal user, and the
other process (which I think is called by dbus or something) runs as the
system superuser in order to perform a particular action on your behalf.
It is relatively fine grained control, and as I understand it, it's
possible to define new policies and whatnot.

I seriously need to read up on the details of all that, though.  I
probably haven't because while I do use Evolution, Empathy, and
Chromium, for pretty much everything else, I live in a sea of
terminals... or, sudo bang bang (http://mpathirage.com/sudo-bang-bang/).

	--- Mike
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