Disk full - Beginner - First time user

[David Fox]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:05 PM, Tiago Pereira<t27026t at yahoo.com.br> wrote:

> tiago at tiago-desktop:~$ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda6             2.3G  2.2G     0 100% /

Depending on what you have installed, I'd say that 2.2 gigs is awfully
small for a linux install these days, and you don't have a separate
home partition.



> /dev/sda1              59G   45G   15G  76% /media/disk
> /dev/sda5              14G   92M   14G   1% /media/disk-1

Plenty of room here. What are these partitions used for? Windows only,
or Linux, or both? Could you perhaps use one or the other for your
personal files (/home)?

I like AC's suggestion of finding out what is hogging the root
partition, but typically there are going to be largish files in /var
that clog that space up - perhaps those can be trimmed. You certainly
don't want to run out of space on your root filesystem.

This will find the top five biggest directories (in terms of space used):

du /var | sort -nr | head -5

Over here, on a 6+ month old ubuntu install that started out as
intrepid back in January, one of the biggest directories is
/var/cache/apt/archives. This directory holds a package cache of all
packages that were installed on the system, in case you need to
reinstall them (so it doesn't have to download them again).
Oftentimes, they contain files that are no longer available, so the
archives are simply taking up space. Try:

$ sudo aptitude autoclean

and see how much space that frees up. It might not free up a lot,
since on a 2.3 gig root partition, you're not going to have a whole
lot of packages installed.



>



-- 
thanks for letting me change the magnetic patterns on your hard disk.