Jun

16

Ubuntu Updates Versus Disk Space – Reader Questions

June 16, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 1 Comment
Posted in Q & A - Ubuntu

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One of our readers "Garry" writes:

"I restored ubuntu 8.04 and it wanted to do 188 updates and then 294 updates. The problem is it takes up all disc space and then the system is unstable. What can be done to fix this problem? Thanks"

There is a way you can approach  this...

1) Only select a few updates at a time (that way the package manager will not download all 188 or 294 updates). Doing so gives you the opportunity to remove some of those used package updates (saving disk space) before you begin the next update session.

2) After each (edited) update session has completed, you can remove the downloaded update packages by issuing the following terminal command:

sudo aptitude autoclean

The above command will remove the incomplete (and I think, already installed) updates.

3) You can also "clean" your hard drive to remove locale file that you don't need on your computer. To do this, you can install localepurge (apt:localepurge) via the command:

sudo aptitude install localepurge

4) Finally, remove orphaned packages and files using deborphan (apt:deborphan). You can install via the command

sudo aptitude install deborphan

5) Also, you can remove purge any application packages off your hard drive removing files, directories, etc. (that you don't need). The syntax for a terminal command would be:

sudo aptitude purge xxx (where xxx is the name of the package).

Example to remove mono and its library; would be sudo aptitude purge mono-common libmono0 (Side note: removing Mono, will remove some of your applications).

I hope the above information helps you.

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Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. incep incep on August 5, 2009 5:50 am

    This helped a lot to find out what is good to delete for more disk space. Thanks.
    I’m using Dell Inspiron mini 9, with 4GB SSD which has actually only 3.4 gigs. I use Ubuntu 9.04 netbook-remix.
    I strongly want to run Open Office 3 or new Go-OO on this netbook, but the disk space has kept shrinking.
    FYI, localepurge freed 20MiB of the disk space.
    And I’ve stopped before deleting all the orphaned libraries, because of some of them it would require to run some application.
    And it seems it will not free more than 3-4 megs as the input of “deborphan -z” suggests.
    Anyway thanks for this useful hint.

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