Hi Clive,
> I tried your commands and it did not seen to do anything
That command will just asked for a sudo password, if you haven't given
it recently, and then should silently delete the Flatpak cache folders
in that directory. As is normal with good shell commands, it doesn't
print a ‘everything went well’ message because that would train the user
to ignore the output and miss the error message when it happens.
> so I reverted to GUI; opened /var/tmp as root deleted all the files.
Were the hundreds of Flatpak cache directories still there?
> rebooted and checked contents of /var/tmp = 5.
Good. A bunch of systemd directories is normal.
> However the warning that filesystem is nearly full remains!
> Checked the 'examine' box to see what that shows; a graphical ring
> chart of root using 13.2GB
I have no idea what that GUI is allocating to ‘root’s usage. Please
stick with
df -h /
to show us the root filesystem's usage.
> var has been reduced to 5.7GB; so flatpak entries have gone.
Okay. You previously said ‘The [var] tmp folder has 11.3GB of data’ so
that's an improvement.
> After aother reboot checked Gparted and that still shows sda1 (root
> partition) still almost full:- sda1 = 26.22GiB, used = 24.13GiB. free
> = 2.09Gib.
Be careful, I don't know whether gparted is including ‘reserved’ space
in its amount of free so you may not be comparing like with like. Stick
with df.
I don't see how the ‘graphical ring chart’ shows ‘root using 13.2GB’ yet
gparted says ‘used = 24.13GiB’ unless the chart is subtracting use by
other things. So don't use the chart. Stick to one method: df.
At one point, you wrote
/var appears to hold11.3GB but that changed to 15.9 after looking
around the file system a bit.
...after I extend [sda1] by 2GB by reducing the 'Swop' partitin.
it's showing only 334Mb free!!!! I checked the /var and it's gone
up to 19+3Gb
It doesn't seem obvious why looking around would use so much extra disk
space.
I think you need to investigate, from the command line, using the
commands Keith suggested. Don't be surprised if the first time you run
du it takes a long time as subsequent runs will find the information it
wants has been cached in RAM from before. It will show some programs
take a lot of space, e.g. /usr/lib/libreoffice, but you're looking for
something which seems odd.
Always use ‘df /’ before and after you delete something to look for the
improvement, even if you're deleting with a GUI.
One last thought, in /boot, how many files are there starting with
‘vmlin’?
--
Cheers, Ralph.
--
Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2021-02-02 20:00
Check to whom you are replying
Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk
New thread, don't hijack: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
