[sid18]

Hi, I bought an Eee PC 901 with Linux the other day, I haven't really used Linux so for now I'm sticking with the basic mode that it has by default.

My problem is that it keeps saying I have ran out of storage space for programs. In the Disk Utility it has 2 sections, "My Documents" and "System Storage" and it is the system storage that has ran out of space. I don't use the My Documents storage since I have an external drive for all of my files so I was wondering if there's any way to take space from the My Documents storage and add it to the system storage.

Thanks for any help.

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You need to see what is taking up the space. In general, you can move some things to another filesystem and create a link to point to it.

From a shell prompt, you can type "df" to see the filesystems and how much space is used/available. From there, you need to look at what is full and see what is in there.

[Kemasa]

You need to see what is taking up the space. In general, you can move some things to another filesystem and create a link to point to it.

From a shell prompt, you can type "df" to see the filesystems and how much space is used/available. From there, you need to look at what is full and see what is in there.

[sid18]

Hi thanks for the reply, i did df from the shell and it came back with this:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs 695716 532132 128244 81% /
/dev/sda1 695716 532132 128244 81% /
none 695716 532132 128244 81% /
tmpfs 514084 20 514064 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 131072 28 131044 1% /tmp
/dev/sdb1 15512328 335624 14388720 3% /home
/dev/sda1 3161695 2896624 265071 92% /ro


That's all of the information it gave me. In the disk utility out of the 2 spaces it shows, 1 is just "/" which is the system memory where software is installed and the other is "/home" where files are stored, the "/home" section has lots of space free but the "/" system memory section is full and I have only installed 2 or 3 small pieces of software and I have no other files stored anywhere, I have a USB Hard Drive for all of my files so they are taking up no space.

If possible I would like to remove allocated space from "/home" (since I won't be using it) and add it to "/" so that I can install more software.


Thanks for any help you can give.



EDIT: After looking around through the files I have found that the Laptop contains 3 file systems, "/", "/ro" and "/home". It seems the Laptop uses both "/" and "/ro" as combined storage for system files and software and uses "/home" as storage for files so would it just be a case of removing some software (to make space), installing some partition managing software (gparted I think) and resizing the partitions to remove space from "/home" and add that space to "/" or "/ro"?

Edited by sid18, 01 January 2009 - 04:16 PM.

[Kemasa]

I am not sure of which filesystem you are using, but it can be difficult to just move the data and/or extend the filesystem without re-installing the OS. Some filesystems can be extended, others can not.

The root filesystem is quite small. If you can re-install, that would be the best thing and have the root filesystem much larger, around 4Gb or so.

If not, you can see where the space is being taken up. First check out /usr/local and see what is there. You can issue the following commands:

cd /usr/local
du -sk *

and see how much space has been taken up. If it is a fair bit, you can move it to the home partition:

cd /usr
tar cf - local | ( cd /home ; tar xpf - )
mv local local.old
ln -s /home/local /usr/local

then when you are sure you have a good copy, remove /usr/local.old (rm -rf /usr/local.old). Be careful, since if you make a mistake you can wipe out a lot.

If /usr/local does not have much in it, you need to find out what is taking up the space. You can do a "du -sk /*" and see which directories have the most, but it is not a good idea to move some things off the root filesystem.

[sid18]

Thanks for the reply, I'm going to try what you've suggested and see if I can free up space, if not I'll re-install, I was thinking of installing another distro anyway since the default is quite limited so I'll be able to partition the drive when I do that.

Thanks again for all the help.