[ubuntu-za] Filesysytem >Root

[Bill Cairns]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all the helpful replies.

A couple of answers: yes, I have put Home into a separate partition to
make it easy to install new versions into the Root partition without
disturbing my directories and files in Home. I did this by following
the advice of just about everyone who has ever commentated about how
to install Ubuntu - and giving Root 10 Gigs (I must have slipped when
moving the slide bar to only get 9.2!) is also what is widely
recommended. No, I cannot believe that 9.2 Gigs is too small for Root.
For the first 30 years of my life with computers even 1 Gig was an
impossible dream - on less that that we ran huge computer centers.

I am afraid that I did not get the du command to give me any useful
information. I need to study it more. The df command told me lots, but
the Disk Usage utility was the most useful tool that I found.
Unfortunately it only works with directories and not partitions and so
there was a lot of jumping from one program to another as I delved
downwards.

I have the Root partition down to a 70% usage which is a bit more
acceptable although I suspect still dangerously high. The biggest
culprit was the old Linux headers. It seems that whenever I updated to
a new version of the kernel, the old one still stays around hogging
disk space. I uninstalled 11 of them (and kept the penultimate one for
just in case) to free up all sorts of space. I also found that Lazarus
and all its offspring are huge and that getting rid of them helped a
lot. (I will keep Lazarus on my other computer).

I am still a bit concerned that someone is eating up my space although
I have not been able to chase down a single culprit. Someone mentioned
log files - my syslog (for instance) seems to contain huge amounts of
useless information (every time the machine hibernates it has a long
conversation with itself about the floppy drive not working - because
it does not have a stiffy inserted presumably. I must have one of the
last machines ever with a stiffy drive and i am not sure that I have
ever used it.

Anyway, i think that I am running along well at the moment - thanks again.

Bill