Duplicate files

[Nigel Henry]

On Wednesday 01 April 2009 16:47, Jonas Norlander wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Steven Vollom
>
> <stevenvollom at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >>> Does it grow as I add
> >>> applications, or are they put in one of the other storage areas?
> >>
> >> New applications are put here (sda2).
> >
> > How does one know how much space to allow for the / partition then if
> > you place new applications in that space?
> >
> >>> When I noticed that of the 50 gb of space that I allocated for the
> >>> primary boot partition only 6gb remained, I became worried that I may
> >>> not notice as it got close to full, and I would overload the
> >>> partition and lock things up.
> >>
> >> Obviously there are only 19GB on your / partition, not 50GB.
> >
> > then what are the 3.9gb spaces that are mostly empty, like tmpfs.
> > Aren't they on the / partition.  And if not, where?  That is over 23gb
> > of space.  What would you recommend for a / partition size?  Can I use
> > the partition feature and take space from another partition to add to
> > the / partition?
>
> As I wrote in another mail in this thread tmpfs is a virtual file
> system and it is only using your RAM. It don't take up 3.9 Gb of your
> hard disks and it dont take up 3.9 Gb of your RAM. It will grow
> dynamical to a _max_ size of 3.9 Gb. And as you see in the output of
> the "df -h" command they are almost empty. You have plenty of RAM so
> don't worry about that.
>
> / Jonas

Regarding /var. it's probably worth a look in /var/cache/apt/archives. A while 
back I was doing the updates on some distro or other, and they 
wouldn't/couldn't install. Opened KDiskFree, which showed the / partition 
redlining. Had a look in /var/cache/apt/archives, and found over 3Gb of 
downloaded packages sitting there.

I don't know what Jaunty (alpha) is like on the frequency of updates, but 
Fedora rawhide, and Debian Sid certainly are updating constantly.

Steven. It's worth a look in /var/cache/apt/archives, and see how much 
harddrive space is being taken up by packages in this directory.

Personally, as I'm on dialup, and may want to install another instance of the 
distro, I copy the archives to a FAT32 partition, which saves downloading all 
the updates again.

If you find there is a whole bunch of packages in /var/cache/apt/archives, you 
can simply do a:  sudo apt-get clean ,  and the packages will miraculously 
disappear, thus giving you back some harddrive space.

Best wishes.

Nigel.