I had three partitions on my computer: root, swap, and home.

But root filled up today and the system became only quasi-operable. Thankfully, swap files are pretty standard now, which obviates the need for a swap partition.

So, I want to eliminate the swap partition and merge it into root.

Here's the current setup.

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  20.0GB  20.0GB  primary  ext4            boot
 2      20.0GB  24.0GB  4000MB  primary  linux-swap(v1)
 3      24.0GB  1000GB  976GB   primary  ext4

First, close a bunch of unnecessary programs and then run

sudo swapoff -a

to empty the swap partition into RAM.

Now, use sudo gparted, and eliminate the swap partition. Using the same, extend the root partition to fill all available space.

A bunch of warnings come up: ignore them.

Reboot.

Upon restart, run:

sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1

This extends the filesystem on the partition to fill all of the space allotted to it.

Now, it is time to create the swapfile. Since home has a lot of space and running out of memory is bad, we make it big.

sudo fallocate -l 8G /home/swapfile.swap

Now, we lock down the swapfile to prevent users or malicious programs from looking into it:

chmod 0600 /home/swapfile.swap

The result is a file which can only be read and written to by root.

Now, we set up encryption for the swapfile by adding the following to /etc/crypttab:

cryptswap /home/swapfile.swap /dev/urandom swap,cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256

We activate the encrypted swap drive:

sudo cryptdisks_start cryptswap

Check to see that it started using:

sudo cryptsetup status cryptswap

Now, we add this line to /etc/fstab so that the encrypted swap is loaded automagically upon start-up:

/dev/mapper/cryptswap none swap sw 0 0

Now, we start up the new swap file:

sudo swapon -a