After several clean re-installations of Ubuntu 11.10 on my Lenovo S12 Laptop (Intel Atom), I found I have five new swap partitions in addition to the original swap partition on 11.04.
Not only do they significantly slow down the system, each additional swap stole disk space from my root partition. Originally 50GB, it was now down to 39GB.
I used "Disk Utility" to discover which partitions were superfluous (/dev/sd⋯, …) then edited as super·user the /etc/fstab
file commenting out them. Then rebooted.
After reboot, I used "Disk Utility" again to delete the five superfluous partitions.
Not the question is, how do I re-size the root partition to recover the stolen space?