I do not understand much of what you wrote. I was only suggesting you to test
the disk. The whole disk. If the disk is failing, you need to change it.
There is no fixing.
The swap is some disk space (a partition in your case but swap files exist
too) used as (a very slow) main memory when the RAM is full. You can disable
the use of all the swap with 'sudo swapoff -a' (valid until the next reboot).
You can also control the relative weight given to swapping out runtime
memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swappiness
From a Live media (such as Trisquel's ISO, which includes GParted), you can
create/delete/enlarge/shrink partitions (including a swap partition) but be
careful: /etc/fstab (that of the installed system, not that of the live
system) must be changed accordingly.
As far as I understand, the framebuffer is in the RAM (nothing to do with the
disk, even if the system swaps). When you reduce it from the BIOS, you
increase in parallel the RAM the system can use and decrease the use of the
swap. As a consequence, if the disk is the culprit, the IO errors may be
delayed thanks to that. Anyway, you do not want to use a failing disk!
That said, because the problem occurs as well with a live system, it might
more probably be a problem with the RAM... although I think GNU/Linux live
systems can use the swap partition on another disk in the system (I am not
sure but you could run the live system after disconnecting the internal drive
just to see if the problem disappears).
Anyway, 1 GB of RAM is too little to run the normal edition of Trisquel (that
is why it swaps). You want Trisquel Mini.
