root partition filling up

[luggw1]

A couple of nights ago I noticed that my root partition is nearly full. My disk is partitioned into the root at about 20 Gb, /home (where all my data goes) and several other partitions for earlier OSes, Windoze, swap, etc. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that it's nearly full, but now I'm on a quest to figure out why. I've found first that in /var/cache/apt there are a bunch of .deb files that I assume apt has used in the past. Can these be deleted?

What else should I look for? I've already gone though and peeled off all the apps that I don't use on a regular basis.

Thanks.
Bill Lugg

[dibl]

Re: root partition filling up

Try these, for starters, in the Konsole:

sudo apt-get autoclean

sudo apt-get autoremove

Then

df

and see how you're doing.

A basic Kubuntu installation, including OOO, Firefox, GoogleEarth, and a dozen of your favorite packages should not exceed about 5GB, so something is definitely going on there. I have a 16GB Kubuntu filesystem, which includes a 5GB VMware Player VM in the /home directory, plus OOO, GoogleEarth, Firefox 3, gimp, and multiple utilities, and it is presently 64% full, so about 10GB total, including the VM.

[luggw1]

Re: root partition filling up

That helped a bit. My free space on the partition jumped from 135 MB to 697 MB running the apt-get commands you suggested. However, something is still amiss. My installation is not too different from yours. I don't run Google Earth, but I do run VMWare with the virtual machines in the /home partition. I probably have a few more apps installed, but nothing significant. I was preparing to do some Qt based development, but hadn't started so I even deleted the Qt 3 and Qt 4 packages just to see what that would free up. I figured I get the latest from Trolltech when it was time anyway.

Right now I'm using a graphical disk map tool to try to find large files or places I can go to get rid of garbage, but I've not had much luck so far.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the help.
Bill Lugg

[kubicle]

Re: root partition filling up

sudo apt-get clean

is a more aggressive method to clean the package cache...that should free up some more room.

EDIT: you can also do something like:

sudo find / -size +10M

to list particularly large files on your root filesystem (>10 Mb)

[luggw1]

Re: root partition filling up

OK, I found the problem. Somehow my home folder got copied to the folder I use for an NFS mount to another computer that I use for backups. Just write it off to a brain-dead move on my part.

Thanks for the pointers though, they will help in the future.
Bill Lugg