how to improve home disk space

[Sid Boyce]

On 15/04/12 13:00, kubuntu-users-request at lists.ubuntu.com wrote:
  Today's Topics: 1. Re: how to improve home disk space (Waleed Hamra) 
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Message: 1 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2012 03:20:26 +0300 From: Waleed Hamra 
<kubuntu-users at whamra.com> To: kubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com Subject: 
Re: how to improve home disk space Message-ID: 
<4F8A144A.7020404 at whamra.com> Content-Type: text/plain; 
charset="iso-8859-1" On 04/15/2012 02:25 AM, Steve Morris wrote:
>>
>> On 08/04/12 21:56, Rajubhai Ramvani wrote:
>>> dear sir,
>>>        when i upgrade any programme the massage is desplaying (disk
>>> space full) or (low disk space). so how can we improve disk space so
>>> in future we not want this type massage. i know the we can do this by
>>> home folder empty.but what is proper solution.anybody can help me.
>>> rajuramvani.
>>>
>>>
>> Hi,
>>      If we assume you only have one partition for Kubuntu, you could
>> check the /tmp and /home/%userid%/tmp directories to see how much space
>> is used in those and delete the contents, which may or may not release a
>> fair amount of disk space. Linux is like windows, by default it doesn't
>> clear temp directories, although having said this some distributions
>> allocate /temp to a ram disk to simulate emptying at shutdown. If your
>> Kubuntu is doing this there should be an entry in /etc/fstab assigning
>> /tmp to tempfs.
>>
>> regards,
>> Steve
>>
> on the contrary, /etc/init/mounted-tmp.conf would tell you otherwise,
> the /tmp directory is deleted on every boot, regardless of mount type :)
>
> as for OP, it would be greatly helpful if you would type the following
> command in a terminal, and tell us the output:
>
> df -h
>
> that is assuming you do read this list, which i'm starting to doubt :\
>
In the days of small disks I could see the need for separate hard drives 
and partitions for the likes of /home, /usr etc.

With the availability of large hard drives it seemed pointless and even 
Solaris went away from the practice and assigned just / and swap.

I have a small /boot partition on some systems dating back to when you 
needed to boot from sectors below 1024 and on some just / and swap.
If I do a fresh install and I need to reformat / I'll tar up /home and 
save it for restoration later. Sometimes doing a fresh install without 
reformatting on systems that are way too downlevel to successfully 
upgrade also leaves /home unaffected.

My setups are normally just / and swap.

If I do an upgrade /home remains untouched.

Some have said that there could be a problem if something bad happens to 
/ but over many years the only time that has happened was when bad 
on-board IDE controllers wrote garbage all over the HD which meant that 
/home was also affected. This happened with at least 3 motherboards 
going back more than 12 years.

I once questioned some friends why they did separate /home, /usr, etc. 
partitions effectively implementing small disks out a large disk and 
they couldn't answer. On their systems when they ran out of space on 
/home meant they had to create symlinks like crazy with
"mkdir /xxx", "ln -s /xxx /home/user/xxx" to overcome the problem caused 
by slicing and dicing.
Regards
Sid.

-- 
Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot
Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support
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Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks