Duplicate files

[Jonas Norlander]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Steven Vollom
<stevenvollom at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I have so little understanding, I hope you will still help me.  I just
> opened df -h.  Here is a copy.
>
>> steven at YESHUA:~$ df -h
>> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>> /dev/sda2              19G   12G  6.1G  66% /
>> tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /lib/init/rw
>> varrun                3.9G  308K  3.9G   1% /var/run
>> varlock               3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /var/lock
>> udev                  3.9G  120K  3.9G   1% /dev
>> tmpfs                 3.9G   88K  3.9G   1% /dev/shm
>> lrm                   3.9G  2.7M  3.9G   1%
>> /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-server/volatile
>> /dev/sda5             230G  129G   89G  60% /home
>> /dev/sda6             204G  188M  193G   1% /home/backup
>> steven at YESHUA:~$
> /dev/sda2 is my OS, is that correct?  Does it grow as I add
> applications, or are they put in one of the other storage areas?

/dev/sda2 is your root partition (mounted as /) and where your OS and
all application is installed. It's 19 Gb and not 50 as you think and
you have 6 Gb free space on it. 6Gb should be enough as you have a
separate partition for your data (sda5 and sda6).

> tmpsf is still on the boot partition, isn't it?  It shows as completely
> usable, in fact varrun, varlock, udev, tmpfs, and lrm really don't have
> much in any of them.  Is 23+gb necessary for the functions they provide?

tmpfs stands for Temporary file system
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs) and don't use any space on your
hard disks, it uses your RAM and grove dynamical and it at will most
use half of your RAM (8/2=4Gb).

> Since all the packages and applications that run anything are contained
> in my primary boot partition, and because I will continue to increase
> their numbers as I am studying and using various tools of a computer
> while I learn, I suspect that I may end up with a rather large group of
> applications that I don't often use, but contain a lot of space.  As I
> learn which of these applications have served their purpose in helping
> me to learn, I will want to remove those that become less useful, but I
> need to know the ones that are long-term important, and I don't
> accidentally want to overload the partition and create a failure.  I am
> getting older and my personal RAM, that that is in my brain, is starting
> to fail.

You have to use your common sense to what package you can remove. If
you in Adept or Synaptic marking the package you want to remove and it
want to remove a lot of others to that looks like they belong to the
OS ask on the list and I'm sure someone can answer if it's safe to
remove it.

/ Jonas