Recommended hard drive diet?

[Eberhard Roloff]

David Armour wrote:

> Hello list!
> 
> They Thought It Would Never Happen Dept.:
> 
> Incredibly, my 30G hard drive has less than 1G remaining free space! The
> mind boggles, and I've come over all twitterpated-loik. Lacking, however,
> this close to Giftmas the disposable fifty or so to buy a replacement --
> and probably much larger hard drive! --, I'm keen to learn what the
> hive-mind might consider "best practice" for putting a small-to-middling
> hard drive with a single-user, edgy system, generic box with vanilla
> cd-burner on a reducing plan? What to do? What to do first? I can see, for
> instance, that I don't have to have all those children grad photos on
> there, or an assortment of '60s music, but what constitutes
> "stripped-down" these days?
> 
> As always, any responses greatly appreciated.

I would try to tackle this from the bottom up.

df -h 
shows you all your partitions on your disk, their respective sizes and what
percentage of that space is in use.

Now, let's assume that your home directory is the place that needs to slim
down. 
Just in case, your problem is located elsewhere, synaptic is your friend.

For an overview of filespace usage in my $home, I personally prefer kdirstat
to show me in detail, which directory is eating up my space.
Surely you can do this with a bunch of other tools and on commandline. I
prefer to do it graphically to have a comfortable overview when it comes
down to deleting files that I kept for so long....

hth
Eberhard