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A friend of mine partitioned his ubuntu system with /usr on a separate partition. That partition is now full. He can't use apt to install new software. Is there anything in /usr that he can safely delete (i.e. delete with rm, not apt-get remove)?

Since he can't install new software he can't install something like dpigs (the tool for checking which packages is taking up space)

Amandasaurus
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6 Answers6

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I had a similar problem. First step was to find the top ten space hogs:

# cd /usr/share
# du -sm * | sort -rn | head -10

/usr/share/doc was 759MB on my system. Space that could be useful for other purposes. With *nix you can move things around without breaking things. In my case I had plenty of free space on /home which was on a different partition:

# mkdir -p /home/share/doc
# mv /usr/share/doc/* /home/share/doc
# rmdir /usr/share/doc
# ln -s /home/share/doc /usr/share/doc

If you are really desparate, you can always mount an external hard drive and perform a similar relocation process. The thing to watch for in that case is that you don't move anything critical to the system startup to the external drive. /usr/src is another candidate, but I wouldn't move /usr/lib, too risky.

CyberFonic
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/usr/share/doc
/usr/src
vlad
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  • /usr/share/doc is the best place to purge. /usr/src *can* contain locally-built stuff that can't be easily replaced. – womble Nov 23 '09 at 14:40
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    yes, but sometimes it conain vanilla kernel and standard sources what easily can be restored from internet – vlad Nov 24 '09 at 11:03
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    /usr/share/doc is a good one to clean up, however, using apt-get to delete the files would be a better way. Is there some easy way to remove those files using apt? – Amandasaurus Dec 21 '09 at 10:28
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Have you tried "sudo apt-get clean", "apt-get autoclean", and "apt-get autoremove"? If you use "man apt-get" that will describe what each does and may free some space.

Bart Silverstrim
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    clean only deletes stuff in /var. – womble Nov 23 '09 at 14:39
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    As @womble said, clean only deletes things in /var. However autoremove will delete things in /usr, so it might save something – Amandasaurus Nov 23 '09 at 15:30
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    Whoops...didn't hurt to try it though :-) Looks like autoremove may give wanted results. It may have given some direction in which to look though. – Bart Silverstrim Nov 24 '09 at 12:06
  • On a similar quest, I found `sudo apt-get clean` to be most effective. `apt-get autoclean` and `apt-get autoremove` actually *decreased* available space. `clean` released it again. I checked disk space with `df -h`. – RolfBly Oct 21 '14 at 15:25
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Another option not explored is to resize the partitions with the gparted livecd. Backup your critical data first though and be prepared to loose the lot just in case. I have done a resize a few times before and not had an issue so it's quite a robust procedure.

Another extension to this is that he could move everything from /usr to another larger partition linking it with a symbolic link to the new location. Then using gparted you can remove the old /usr partition and merge /usr into the other partition.

Personally, I don't see the need to separate partitions for /usr /home etc like the old days. It often results in more issues than it solves (i.e. running out of space). Still, that's just my opinion.

hookenz
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I like the solution by CyberFonic best, however when creating the symlink I had to give it the option for 'no dereference' since it's a directory. Otherwise i would get errors when installing anything that tried to add a doc file, since /usr/share/doc wasn't being seen as a directory. I couldn't cd to /usr/share/doc until I did the symlink like so:

sudo ln -sfn /home/usr/share/doc /usr/share/doc

EE1337
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An ugly hack would be to try uninstalling GNOME and get something lightweight instead. Presumably this shall save some space.

Anonymous
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