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So this morning I turned on my Acer C710 running ChrUbuntu 12.04.4 LTS (I like this version better than the newer updated ones.) and the screen says that "The system is running in low graphics mode".

I ran this script:

df -h

And got this: 

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7       9.0G  8.6G     0 100% /
devtmpfs        936M  4.0K  936M   1% /dev
none            188M  704K  187M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            937M     0  937M   0% /run/shm
overflow        1.0M  4.0K  1020K  1% /tmp

Then I tried to delete directories by running this:

To free space you can:

sudo apt-get autoclean

Look for large directories with: 

sudo du -sc /*/* |sort -g

and delete unwanted content

3.Clean your home directory using a combination of 

cd ~ 
du -sc * |sort -g 
rm myLargeFile

I keep getting an error that I cannot delete my desktop, downloads, and pictures because they are directories. Why??? Where do I go from here? Can I salvage any documents?

Thanks guys

Phosphorus
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1 Answers1

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It sounds like you are trying to delete directories. The rm command only works on files by default.

To delete one file called "filename":

rm filename

To delete an empty directory called "dirname":

rmdir dirname

Please be careful with this one! To delete the directory "dirname" and everything in it:

rm -rf dirname

Keep in mind that anything you rm is effectively gone forever. If deleting files doesn't solve your problem, let me know.

TheSchwa
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  • No this did not work. I tried to reinstall ChrUbuntu and it kept saying that I had broken pipes. When I try to delete files I get this error: rm cannot remove 'Filename': Is a directory – Phosphorus Aug 08 '14 at 23:49
  • No this did not work. I tried to reinstall ChrUbuntu and it kept saying that it had broken pipes. When I try to delete files I get this error: rm cannot remove 'Pictures': Is a directory when I used rmdir I get this error rmdir: failed to remove 'Pictures': Directory not empty. Please bear with me this is my first time ever owning or running Linux on a system. I did notice that there was a lot of space being used on my desktop from TOR. I wonder if that messed things up? – Phosphorus Aug 08 '14 at 23:56
  • Any way to recover files from the document folder? I had so much important work information there. :-( – Phosphorus Aug 08 '14 at 23:58
  • The easiest way to approach this is probably to boot from Live Media, such as a Live USB. Then you should have the full user interface and be able to delete files or copy them to an external hard drive. – TheSchwa Aug 09 '14 at 00:46
  • Thanks so much. I appreciate it....Wait but no easy way to erase everything and start from scratch though? – Phosphorus Aug 09 '14 at 01:59
  • I didn't realize that's what you wanted to do. You can certainly do that, just install Ubuntu from the Live Media and choose the option to "Erase disk and install Ubuntu". That should erase everything on the entire hard disk and start completely from scratch. – TheSchwa Aug 09 '14 at 02:03
  • Thank you. Again I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question. @TheSchwa – Phosphorus Aug 09 '14 at 13:39