I strongly suggest that you read through the entire lab before you get started!
Try /sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/hde1 to see (in human-readable form) much of the information recorded in the super block and related areas of the filesystem.
In order to get better resolutions available in X-Windows, change the monitor section of /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, so that horizontal sync is 28-95, and vertical refresh is 50-120. The better numbers will at least enable 1024x768 resolution when you next run X-Windows.
Create an account for yourself using useradd and passwd. Notice that it automatically created a home directory and a personal group in /etc/group. Look at the password you created in /etc/shadow to see whether it is md5 or not. How can you tell?
Establish an account for me, called prof, with the specific password: $1$xwuSdU4J$EQ1/f4m9zvbYJt2NXHu831 so that I can log in with a password that I know. Create a new entry in /etc/group for a new group, and add your account and the prof account to it. Verify that your account now is in two groups using the groups command.
Boot into single user mode. Remount root partition read-only using umount -r /
Run parted and use print to see the partitions on your drive. Make a note of the starting position of partition 3 (which is the / partition). On my machine it was 1051.128MB. Use the resize command to make partition 3 approximately 10GB (so, for my machine, I used an ending position of 11051.128). This will take about 15 minutes to complete.
(An alternative to parted would be to use resize2fs and then fdisk to change the partition table.)
We could continue using parted, but fdisk is the more common tool so we'll use it next. Run fdisk on your drive (/dev/hda). Use the m command to see what options it supports, and use the command to print the partitions (you should see a smaller 3rd partition than when you looked via parted before resizing). Since there can only be 4 primary partitions, create a new extended partition (which counts, actually, as one of the primary partitions) containing the rest of the drive. This extended partition now can be subdivided into many additional partitions. Create a new partition (within the extended partition) of size 512M. Change the type of the partition to Linux swap. Record the partition table changes and quit. You'll likely get a warning message now, so you'll need to reboot (multi-user is fine).
Note that linux will complain, saying that the filesystem was shutdown uncleanly, which is true, but it is likely that no errors were introduced since we were in single-user mode before we re-mounted read-only. As a result, you don't really need to force a file system integrity check -- there were no errors when I did the check on my system.
Once the machine is back up and you've logged in as root, you can now use that new partition. Use mkswap to establisht the new partition as a swap file (this is very fast). Now use top to see that you still only have 1GB of swap. While the filesystem is ready, the OS hasn't yet been told to use it. Edit /etc/fstab to include the new swap partition, then use swapon -a to turn it on. Run top to see that you now have 1.5GB of swap.
In most cases it is inadvisable to resize a live filesystem. We got around that issue by running in single user mode, and remounting as read-only. However, if there is a problem or you make a significant mistake, you'll need to re-initialize your drive from the beginning. That is the purpose of the boot floppy you have. If you boot your machine using the floppy, it will contact the KickStart server on the network and reload the drive the same way you got it at the beginning of the semester. This process is slow -- more than 3GB are copied onto your drive! It takes more than half an hour to finish. Make sure you take the floppy out after it has gotten started -- otherwise if you don't notice that it is done, it will reboot and re-start the process all over again!