Hello,
I have linux on a 30GB hard drive. But I could see almost 17GB is used by system files. I want more space. Does removing KDE solve this problem? I have'nt downloaded or installed any other software. This huge stuff came with the installation CD.

If yes, how do I remove KDE completly? I am using GNOME.

When I go to mandriva control center, and uncheck all the items related to KDE, it says the size selected is only about 315 KB..thats far less.. is this the size kde really sits on? how do i find out what eating my hard drive?

Thank you so much for you time and helping me..

You could clear your urpmi cache, as well as purging your system logs- the latter can be really huge if some persistent events are monitored.
After clearing the above, the installed KDE packages should typically be (for a modular package distro like Mandriva) around 300 MB. You said above 315KB, is it a typo? - plz confirm.
Anyway, if you do a regular

it will also uninstall all packages which depend on those two, namely the whole KDE suite.

Thanks for your help. Its 312 exactly. Please find the screen shot attached that talks about the size.
I am sorry for my ignorance, but how do I clear the urpmi cache and purge out the system logs?
i tried urpmi -- clean.. but this gives me the usage options but it does not really clean.

thank you so much

I suggest you use a file manager as root and have a poke around in your logs. For instance -


Look in the /var/log directories. You can delete any large logs, as they will get recreated, BUT you should have a look at them first, in case a process is repeatedly failing and filling the log.

If you haven't installed lots of extra software, you shouldn't have to delete any applications...

This must be totally wrong - there's no way that the system would use 17 GB, even if you copy the whole DVD to disk. It shouldn't take more than ~10 GB including the DVD copy.
What does the command "df" say? (That is, if you run df <enter> in a terminal window)?

Here's the output: Thank you

How much space does your personal files take up?
Check with:

Install a small programme called filelight.

With it you can easily find what area is hogging space.
Judging by the size of what you say is using space, I really don't think kde is going to save you much.

I suspect that you have large caches that are not cleared automatically, including thumbnails of images. in earlier days I was shocked to find that I had 3.5Gbs of thumbnails in a hidden folder called ./thumbnails which caused my home account to be filled up and I was unable to even enter my account .

It looks more like trouble of your own making rather than what Mandriva has done.
I see you don't have a separate partition for /home . You have only one partition for Mandriva for everything.
Not a very good idea. It doesn't surprise me that the amount used is so high because it is system files, music and photos as well most likely, personal files and documents and settings.
You have everything in just one partition whereas most people at least create a separate partition for /home and often separate ones for Photos, music and documents so they can readily see what is generally taking up the most space but most importantly for ease of installations and updates. These extra partitions don't have to be disturbed when doing installs or upgrades.
There are also a lot of applications that you use in Gnome that also use kde files as well, and vis a versa.

John.

I agree with AussieJohn. The problem lies with your partitioning, not with KDE.
I would suggest that you backup all your personal files to another disk (borrow one if you have no extra space, or burn it all to DVD's) and do a complete reinstall.
If you want plenty of space, you can make a "/" partition of, let's say, 12 GB, and a "/home" partition of 18 GB.
This time, if you don't want KDE, only check "Gnome" when you choose which desktop to install.
You might wind with some KDE libraries anyway, but the size will be insignificant.

The partitioning isnt going to fix anything, though it might have been nice if done at install time. If he had a seperate /home, he'd have less space everywhere, his remaining space would be split between the two. So now, there's no point moving home, it'll result in less space for / and /home.

It's the same amount of data, in the same space, but now the remainder is split.

James

Of course, but that's not the point. The point is that when you have a separate /home partition, you can see what data belongs to what part, since he obviously doesn't know that now.
And I suggest that it would be rather easy to fix - having "/home" separate makes it so much easier to handle in the long run that maybe it's worth the trouble.
And, of course, you don't have to have 12 GB for the "/" partition; that's just if you allow yourself the luxury to copy the contents of the DVD to disk (which I usually do).

oh but it is the point. it's too late to separate home now. so we need to identify where the space is used, using tools like du, and filelight.

Well you want to remove KDE but Konqueror has a very handy tool, called filesize view which allows you to see the size of all directories and files graphically.

Last week I had a similar problem btw, I found /tmp was filled up with gigabytes of flash files!

Thanks all for the help.. i ll try file size today...

And, if splitting my hard-drive would only give me clarity, thats Ok.. as If i repartition my hard drive, i will also loose my windows partitions..
Does splitting my HDD improve performance? If yes, then I would give it a try..

I realised removing KDE is not a solution... i deleted log files.. it freed up 1.7 GB...

I think i will uninstall unnecessary applications too and check..

?? Either, I didn't make myself clear, or otherwise you didn't read my post :-/
Of course, it's not to late. It's a bit of work, yes, but all he has to do is to save *the important files*. like images, text files, music and so on, to other media, then to do a reinstall and format the new partitions.
He has a dumb setup now - why not help him to make it better?

You don't have to lose your windows partitions, they will not be affected at all if you split up your linux partition. (And I don't think the performance will be affected, either way).
All you have to do is to transfer your *important data* (that is, data that you have created or added yourself, to your user directory) to another disk or DVD, and then do a new install with a new partitioning. Then, just copy the data back to your new "/home" partition.
You may have to reinstall some programs, but otherwise everything should be OK.

So which do you think is the easier solution?
1) Delete the files which are taking up the space on the hard drive
2) Backup all the stuff, repartition the hard drive, reinstall the operating system, copy the files back, reinstall the programs, reset the configuration, settings, tweak everything back to the way it was

?
I'm not saying repartitioning is a bad idea, but it's a mighty big sledgehammer to crack a tiny nut here. And if space is limited then it only reduces the available space on / even further. It could even make the problem worse.
Here's something I wrote on another thread, might be of some use:
I'd be interested to know how you "could see almost 17GB is used by system files." - where did you see this?

And just to repeat, yes the advice to have a separate /home is good, and maybe next time you install you should carefully consider this.

Of course it's easier to delete the files. I think though (as I said before) that it might be worth the extra trouble to create a saner setup. (Something tells me that, if you find 17 GB of unknown files on your disk, that some of the "tweaking" that was done may not have been perfect anyway :-) )
But of course it's up the user - I'm just saying that it's perfectly doable without destroying the windows partitions.

There is only one reason where you would only create one partition of / on your system. That is if you have a very small hard disk in your machine, which is unlikely these days. Reason for not splitting on smaller disks is so that you don't restrict yourself by allocating space to mount points that are unlikely to use it. As I said, this is unlikely these days that you would ever do this.

It seems Rama Murthy here partitioned only one partition from the df command. Incidently, a great way to check your directory sizes from the command line is:



It will then check each directory as it does a directory listing, creating a summary for each directory and ensuring it lists in MB than in bytes.

Looks like your command is the same as except that I don't understand the `ls` part - what do those slopey apostrophes do?
It looks like you're piping the output of the ls command to du, but I've not seen that syntax before.

Basically, except it's not really piping, it's more like you're passing the output of ls as variables. If you were to do ls | du -sh I think you would get different output (something worth testing, anyways - I'm no bash guru).

You're right, it is different, because ls | du -sh doesn't work.
Ian's command is basically the same as though, from what I can tell. Except that I can type it without copy-pasting from Ian's post (I think that's the first time I've ever tried to use that key on my keyboard, and it doesn't seem to work!)

I am also in need of some space, it is safe to delete the locales which I don't need from /usr/share/locale/ there a lot of them and they take up 234MB

Sure but you should remove them using urpme or the add/remove software tool rather than just deleting the files. If you want to use the command line you can use to list the rpms you have installed, then use urpme to remove them.

strange thing I don't even have these locales installed, just en.....

for en only

I'm sorry, Rama. We seem to be taking over your thread. Let us know if you have any problems?

oops.. i m scared...
i think i have found out the problem... i kept on checking the size of each folder in my file system..
i found the size of mnt folder as whooping 19.4 GB.. its showing all my windows partitions in it.. i am clue less now.. why are files in windows file system are occupying my linux space??

plz refer the screen shot...

thanks once again to every one for trying to help me out... thanks so much for your patience..

aaaah.. sorry... dumb question....

there are two folders in my file system called "ftp" and "lib"... what are they meant for? they occupy about 4 gb...
the ftp folder has a folder called mandriva... it has all .rpms..
and the lib has strange stuff like core.3743 etc.. these are occupy about 2 gb!!
can i delete these?

core.XXXX files you can safely remove, they are files left by crashes, I guess you can safely remove those rpms too, you could always redownload them

Seems you sort found your first virus
That should be the copy of the install DVD. Handy to have, since you don't have to change disks when you install new software, but you can live without it - especially if you're short of space. Don't know if it's practical to just erase them though?

All those Windows files you refer to in your post (with the screen capture) are not occupying anything within your Linux OS.
All it is doing is showing you what your Linux can give you access to in Windows if you want to. The Windows stuff is still in the Windows partitions and nowhere else.

John.

Thanks John... I got that... that was a dumb question..

Sorry Rama, didn't mean to embarrass you.

Cheers. John.

How kind and helpful people here are... I am lucky to be a part of this forum..

Neat, I never thought of using the asterisk instead. Always think of something complicated