Beginner Guide to LVM

LVM allows you to resize and combine partitions, etc. This is especially great when you environment is virtualized and you don't have physical access to the machine. You can't exactly easily boot your favorite linux disto on a VM to resize your existing partitions.

Great guide to LVM

https://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm

Fix Locale Errors

Running this will fix locale errors: 

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

dpkg-reconfigure locales 

To make the change permanent, I ran

update-locale LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 

which writes to /etc/default/locale. 

If you use bash as your shell, you can put these lines in your
~/.bashrc and ~/.profile