I get why they called it Gigolo. It's the Xfce utility that "mounts anything without complaining."

The things it mounts include ftp and sftp over the network, WebDAV and Windows shares. I'd rather not use it at all, but in Xfce's Thunar file manager, you still need Gigolo to access these remote filesystems.

But since I'm using GNOME and the Nautilus file manager, which is advertised as having baked-in ability to access sftp/ftp and various other networked filesystems, you'd think I'd have no need for Gigolo.

Unfortunately this isn't true.

As often as I create bookmarks in Nautilus to my often-used sftp/ftp sites, they disappear. I don't know why. I've blogged about it recently but find no bug reports.

And though it may be due to the ftp sites I'm using, after a certain period of neglect, during which I don't access a given ftp site after doing so earlier in the session, Nautilus either disconnects or is disconnected from a given ftp server and won't reconnect. Thunar seems to do a better job or reinitiating the connection, but Gigolo is a quick way to "respawn" said ftp connection and get it working again with my file manager, be it Thunar or Nautilus.

But what's really annoying is continually losing my ftp bookmarks in Nautilus. This never happens in Gigolo. It may be awkward, poorly designed and cringe-inducingly named, but it does what it says.

I bit the bullet and did some repartitioning of my Debian Wheezy-running laptop to give myself more space on the Linux side by taking it from the seldom-used Windows side of my dual-boot system.

I had wanted to make my existing Debian partitions bigger, but due to the fact that modifying LVM -- especially with some partitions encrypted -- is a bit too mysterious and difficult, I decided to work with the Windows 7 partitions on the drive instead. Once I shrunk Windows, I planned to use the freed-up space for a new Linux partition. After that I would configure my Debian system to use it.

When I set up this laptop back in 2010, I did a fresh, crapware-free Windows 7 Home Premium installation at the very end of the drive. Windows dumped its main partition and small boot partition right there. At the time I gave something like 100 GB (out of the 320 GB drive) to Windows.

That's where I got my "extra" space for Linux.

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