I believe I have isolated the cause of all the weird problems.
Once first up with Trisquel 6.0 Live, I did the following 3 commands:
$ free -m
Mem: 431 425 5
buffers 176 254
Swap: 1014 0 1014
$ sudo swapoff /dev/zram0
$ free -m
Mem: 431 425 5
buffers 178 252
Swap 798 0 798
-------------------------------------------------
With Disk utility, I have the following listing:
Storage Devices
Local Storage
Pata Host Adapter
Peripheral Devices
701 MB File (filesyste.squashfs)
Generic Flash Disk (unused ext2 partition)
40 GB Hard Disk (with fat32, 800MB swap, and Ext4)
193 MB Solid State Disk
I was now able to access and reformat what was still defined as swap on the
solid state drive (/dev/zram0) to ext2 and I also encrypted it with a long
key, to ensure nothing from it could be accessed by any process. I didn't
even bother benchmarking it any more. While I am up it should hopefully stay
quarantined.
-------------------------------------------------
With gparted, the only listed devices are the bootable usb flash and usb
winchester:
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb
--------
I thank you all for your interest and helpful advice.
Martins
trisquel@trisquel:~/Documents$ uptime
12:12:23 up 16:41, 8 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.07
trisquel@trisquel:~/Documents$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 368 353 14 0 16 112
-/+ buffers/cache: 224 144
Swap: 798 138 660
Peace at last!
