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I am very new at Ubuntu, actually, linux in all its entirety. I've installed Ubuntu to an old pc I had laying around so I can have something to keep myself occupied with, and I've noticed that I've "run out of space" on the drive it's installed on.

I looked in the system settings and it said that I had a 78 gigabyte drive in, and it's mounted, but whenever I try to install a program using something like sudo apt-get install chromium-browser, it will tell me that I don't have enough space. What I'm trying to find out is how I would specify where I want the program to be installed, like the other drive that has space.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated, thank you all!

EDIT: I was asked to type in sudo parted -1 and when i did, it said:

parted: invalid option == '1'
usage: parted [-hlmsv] [-a(align)] [DEVICE [COMMAND [PARAMETERS]]...]

When I typed in df -h, it said that /cow had 988M, 100% use; udev had 977M, 1% use; tmpfs had 198M, 1% use; /dev/sdb1 had 30G, 4% use; /dev/loop0 had 953M, 100& use; none had 4.0K, 0% use; and the only other significant one was /dev/sda1, which had 72G and had 1% use.

Jacob Vlijm
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Nagrae
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  • there is probably more than one partition; could you edit your question & include the output from sudo parted -l (run from a terminal - you can copy / paste it) - & also df -h? – Mark Williams Mar 14 '15 at 00:00
  • FYI -- that should be dash l (lowercase L, as in lemons), not dash one. – Sam King Mar 14 '15 at 00:07
  • Are you sure you've installed Ubuntu? How exactly did you do it? COW stands for "copy on write", /cow is used on Live USB sticks with persistence enabled. Please, post the full output of sudo lsblk and df -h. – Eric Carvalho Mar 14 '15 at 14:06
  • Thanks for providing further information, but you mistyped the parted command: it should be -l, not -1. As for the output of df -h, it would be great if you paste it into the editor verbatim and format it as a code listing with the <$> button from the editor toolbar. – David Foerster Mar 19 '15 at 01:15

1 Answers1

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To clarify, you have two hard drives, one with the operating system and one extra, and the OS drive is small, so it's full?

If that's the case, the easiest way would probably be to reinstall Ubuntu on the larger drive.

If you're interested in learning more or learning the actual answer to your question, read on.

If you come from a Windows environment, you're probably used to everything starting at the hard drive level (eg, C:\\Windows or D:\\Program Files). In Ubuntu, things are unified, so a directory called "/" is the root of Ubuntu's view of everything.

When you install Ubuntu, you can set up partitions and choose what parts of the file system is on which partition. This lets you put, for instance, your user files (which are all stored in /home/your-user-name) on a different partition or a different disk than your installed programs and operating system files (which might be in places like /bin or /usr/bin).

If you have a disk mounted but you didn't configure Ubuntu to use that disk for its OS files or for your home directory, it's probably in /media/your-user-name/the-name-of-the-hard-drive. This is true of USB drives as well as internal hard drives. If you open up Files and then click on "Computer" in the left sidebar, that will bring you to the root of your computer (/), so try to click on media, your username, and the the name of the hard drive to figure out exactly what the full path to your drive is.

Now that you know the full path of your external drive, you should be able to use it to install programs using apt-get. The instructions at How can I install a package without root access? should work, but when those answers tell you to use $HOME, you will instead want to use /media/your-username/your-drive-name (whatever you found in the previous step).

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Sam King
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