How do I minimize disk space usage

Question

One of my machines is the 2GB EeePC Surf, a neat netbook with very limited resources. So limited that right now, I have 22MB free space left.

On it, I'm running Arch Linux with the Openbox DE and a host of needed applications for it to function as a mobile PC.

What methods are available to stamp out some unnecessary used space?

Answer 1

Here are some points you could start with:

• Have a look at the packages installed on your system with pacman -Q and remove the ones you don't need. A good start may be to append the -t switch:

  Restrict or filter output to packages not required by any currently installed package.

• Clean the package cache of pacman with pacman -Sc

• Always use pacman -Rs to remove also unused package dependencies.

• To find "big files" and folders which use large parts of the disk, a nice addition to du is xdiskusage. This little tool lets you quickly browse your filesystem and see graphical representation of the disk usage of the folders.

Answer 2

On the 4GB disk in my Eeepc with Ubuntu it helped to remove some locale files (from /usr/share/locale) and Gnome help files (from /usr/share/gnome/help/). Both were installed for languages which I don't use. Not sure if Arch Linux even installs all those files, though.

Answer 3

I would suggest AUTOMATING looking at your own very old files and see if its necessary and remove them. This can done with two things. One writing a find command to look for very old files. and using this output (maybe pipe) to lograte script to archive files older than says 3 months and delete files older than 3 months in archive and send a mail to 1 day before deleting it. So that you can be sure you have not lost any important file. So in finally you would need the following commands to accomplish the above:

find , | , logrotate , mail, crontab

I am not going to spoon feed you. I have done this before has been quite successful with this and was later scrapped because we decided to go with nagios for monitoring as it was more tuned to do that kind of stuff in a corp server. I think if mail command is not already configured for you, you might find that the toughest rest should be straight forward. This all needs to done through bash scripting and putting that in cron job and to run every x days. Learn bash scripting, it will be very useful not only for this but to make your life easier with *nix. So use your favourite internet search engine and read about the above commands and bash scripting. And tie them together and test it. Once satisfied put to regular use. I assure it will be fun doing this. You will learn a lot if you haven't done this kinda before.

• Hope that helps