[Cbsupport] Re: Why is my hdd so full?

[Mike Williams]

> >You didn't tell us how your partitions are setup?
> >
> best I can do is CDROM, floppy, hdd ide, dev

Not really what I was after. Try issueing "mount" and copy/paste the
response (if you don't know, highlight what you want to copy then press
the middle mouse button to paste)

> >Did you know that debian generally keeps a huge archive of packages at
> >/var/cache/apt/archives ? If your crashed partition contains this
> >directory, you could do an apt-get autoclean to get rid of unnecessary
> >packages, or simply delete everything ending in .deb.

> Using Kstart/home (personal directory)/Konqueror
> /var/cache/apt/archives
> Contains 857 Items 856 files +525MB
> All end in .deb as far as I can see

There is also a directory called partial.

> I'm not sure of this auto -clean I'm worried it might remove something I 
> need
> Computerbank said not to remove any lib  thingys

The directory in question is an archive of packages that have been
downloaded and (presumably) installed. The purpose of this is so you can
reinstall or remove a package and change your mind, so the package doesn't
have to be downloaded again.

Debian doesn't auto-delete old versions of packages (eg you have mozilla
vers 1.01, 1.02 and 1.03 all in your archive). The way to remove
unnecessary old versions is with apt-get autoclean. This checks everything
in that directory and deletes all but the most up-to-date version. This is
a slight over-simplification of what it does, by the way.

If your apt-cache directory is causing the disk to be full, you should
certainly run the command to free up some space. No harm results from
it. If there are no delete-able packages, nothing happens. You must be
root to autoclean.

It's true you shouldn't delete any libs, but that's completely unrelated.

Mike

**********************************
Mike Williams
Lecturer
Computing & Information Management
Trinity Foundation Studies Program
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