How to allocate more space alongside Windows

Question

I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop, alongside WinXP. Now I'm trying to download some updates and it says that I don't have enough free disk space - I need to free some more space on "/".

Since there's plenty of room on the machine, I suppose it means that not enough space is allocated for the Ubuntu partition itself, right? How can I solve this?

_{I'm a Windows guy who hasn't so much as seen a Linux desktop up until about an hour ago.}

UPD

Apparently it's installed in the same partition as Windows. At least, I don't remember it asking me about space allocation during installation, and when I log into Windows I can see that the disk only has one partition. I do remember it saying something about reduced disk performance if I chose a specific option - and that's the one I chose :).

Answer 1

(This answer assumes you installed in a separate partition on the same drive with your Windows partition.)

You should look into using a program like gparted to resize your partions and the file-systems inside them. Since this operation is very difficult to do from a running system, I suggest you use the GParted LiveCD (There are also LiveUSB versions on their site). This will allow you to boot up to a separate software stack without mounting any drives and edit your partition scheme and re-size the file systems.