the volume boot has only 5.9mb disk space remaining

Question

I have ubuntu 12.04 and I need to clear some space for my updates. I did a procedure that a tech showed me where I purchased my computer where you go to fur and copy-paste a line beginning with dpkg and it pretty much did the rest.This time though it wont work. I think it was a one time thing. So can someone show me a procedure to fix this in basic non computer nerd language cause I'm not very computer savy? Thanx

Answer 1

When you do updates and install packages, "deb" package files are downloaded and put into the directory /var/cache/apt/archives/ and will stay there unless you clean them out.

The way to do this is with the command

apt-get clean

which will delete all of the "deb" package files from that directory which been processed.

If you want to clean up your system further, install deborphan

sudo apt-get get deborphan

Running deborphan will show you which packages installed on your system and are redundant. Typically these are library packages which no other package requires because the package that required them was removed for whatever reason.

You can if you choose remove them by passing the output of deborphan to the command to remove them with

dpkg --purge deborphan

When running dpkg --purge, one is always prompted for confirmation to remove the packages specified.

If your /var directory is on your "volume boot" and not on a separate file system, you should check to see how much space it is using and if the problem is also due to large log files which have gradually accumulated. These can be kept trimmed down using the logrotate package and specifying how often to process the log file and how many previous versions to keep either on a daily, weekly, monthly basis or just on fixed size.