Working with partitions in Zorin 15.2

New to Linux, I tried to install Zorin alongside Windows 7 (before support ended) but the latter was erased due to bogus advice. (Luckily it turns out I'm quite happy with Zorin alone.) I have a Dell Latitude with 320GB hard drive, but so far only 44GB has been allocated: 2 to /boot, 42 to Extended (subsuming /home, /root, /var and swap, each in their own partition). That leaves 276GB unallocated free space. My question is will the /home partition keep expanding to grab free space as needed, or do I need to DO something to allocate free space? Better yet, can anyone point me to a basic tutorial covering the subject line of this post?
- Cliff in Nova Scotia

The tool you need is Gparted, the Linux partition editor. Get it from the software center if you don't have it. You just enlarge or extend the home partition. I like to burn Gparted onto a CD, so you can boot from that. This comes in handy if you can't boot Zorin for some reason.

Here are some tutorials you will find helpful:

https://itsfoss.com/gparted/
https://www.howtogeek.com/114503/how-to ... artitions/

And here is a tool every Linux user should have:

https://www.fosslinux.com/1532/create-a ... ary-os.htm

The boot repair disc has saved my bacon many times when I couldn't boot into Linux. don't worry that it says it's for Ubuntu, it will work fine on Zorin.

Thanks for helping me out. I did find something in the onboard Help, but not a word about Gparted, which I've now installed. I'll check out those other handy liinks.

The key to changing partition sizes is that you have to enable LVM (Logical Volume Manager) at point of install - this can produce it's own problems:

https://www.ufsexplorer.com/articles/st ... zation.php

https://github.com/lvmteam/lvm2/issues/17

Traditionally, Linux could only shrink volumes not expand them - I prefer to setup the partitions that I want from scratch. Under (U)EFI system this is:

1. FAT32 Primary Partition (esp) for EFI boot - 50 Mb
2. '/' - 50 Gb Primary, formatted to Ext4
3. Extended/Logical partition which holds:
a. swap area at END of partition - double the amount of physical RAM present in the machine
b. everything in front of swap marked as '/home' formatted to Ext4.

So if '/' goes AWOL, home is safe on it's own, I just need to reinstall '/' and have to mark '/home' as '/home' once more so it gets picked up in the partition table.
NEVER select new partition table when installing and using GParted - that would wipe out everything.
As discussed at the local Linux User Group, the best setup is actually to have '/' on one drive and '/home' on another - that way you can have multiple OS's sharing the same '/home' but this is only really practical when it comes to Desktops as opposed to Notebooks.