As the reclaimed space won't
be seemlessly integrated into /home/sheila and my mother has no real
need for an extra 40gb I'll leave it there for the moment.
Well, if you want to be adventurous, there's always LVM (Logical Volume Management). Basically it allows you to merge different partitions into a single mount point. I know Fedora uses it by default, but I think they're the only ones. It isn't for the faint hearted, but managed to use it when I was switching from a dual-boot setup to a pure Linux system.
My linux partition was too small to hold all the data I wanted to keep from my Windows partition, so I moved what I could, shrank the windows partition, added the reclaimed space as a new physical partition, added that partition to the LVM merging it with /home. Wash, rinse, repeat.
So now my hard drive is in about 6 physical partitions all merged back into one file system block. It's a bit of a mess, but it works just fine.
The other thing I can't replace is QuickDelete, which lets one look at
e-mail headers and delete them if they're crap. But xoveroffice does run
it, however if anyone knows of an equivilent it'd be glad to know about it.
I take it this QuickDelete program is a client that downloads the header of emails, and then lets you delete them directly from the server rather than downloading the body and deleting them from the client?
I'm not 100% sure about this (someone might want to back me up or refute the claim), but I'm pretty sure Evolution only downloads the email header when you "fetch" new mail. The body isn't loaded until the email is opened. So deleting mail from your inbox before you open it is functionally identical. Plus with the client side spam filtering enabled, it should be a lot easier to manage than manually going through and having to cull the list. You might want to hear someone agree with that statement before repeating it at a diner party, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
So no trauma and someone who really doesn't care about where their
software comes from and would go comatose if the ideological soundness
of OSS was explained has been migrated without tears.
