Ubuntu eats almost 4 gigs disk, any solutions?

Hi,

Does anyone know any good guides for reducing the disk space used by Ubuntu? Almost 4 gigs is insane and it's quite difficult to tackle. I'm using 9.10 but I'm quite familiar with ubuntu, a guide for any version will do.

Cheers

 

I'm wondering what you have loaded that's taking up so much space. Even on my 64-bit desktop, the Koala is only taking up 3.3G. You might try running synaptic, go to Settings->Preferences->Columns_and_Fonts and move the Installed Size column up before Installed Version. Then click on the Size column in the main window to see what's taking up all that space. Eliminate as you see fit, just don't break the whole system

 

3.3, almost 4 gigs... Since I'm running ubuntu from a 4gig SD card, what I really meant was "I have almost no space left". lol, pardon the imprecision : -p

Thanks for the tip. The thing is, by sorting the packages by size I just get the usual culprits. Open office, the gimp etc... I can get extra space by getting rid of software, but I mean, I need the software lol. I was asking for a guide to do something more subtle and more invasive, substituting gnome software by lightweight counterparts without loosing functionality, removing locales, disabling package caching for example, that kind of thing.

I can see myself spending 8 hours doing this and writing my own guide already...

 

I've run LXDE, but Ubuntu (and Fedora) are so Gnome-centric that it's hard to get rid of a lot of that junk. I've removed locales, removed fonts for languages I can't begin to read, swapped in abiword and gnumeric for openoffice, run apt-get clean on a regular basis, deleted the Ubuntu examplesand other doc files, and reduced Ubuntu's footprint to about 2.8GB. Not subtle - more like taking an ax to it.

I suppose there's always the option of moving to an 8GB SD card

 

I know it's not very helpful, but I'm with RockDoctor on this one.

The amount of effort to reduce the installation size is considerable even to trim 1GB. There is an alternative, which is to start with a minimal installation and build it up but that is also a lot of work, probably even more.

Considering a new 8GB SDHC card only costs around £10 these days, I would say that the effort of trimming your installation (which will take hours) is just not worth the saving of £10.

There are, of course, more lightweight distros, both based on Ubuntu (eg Xubuntu) and others but in my not at all humble opinion, Ubuntu is the best general purpose consumer distro and my advice would be to stick to it and get a new card.

 

Get an 8gb SD card.

But... that leads to a question I have had for some time. I'm running 9.04 in a 32gb partition of a 160gb HDD. At some future point, I may wish to replace the HDD with a 32gb SDD. I would prefer to copy my existing install (which has gone through a lot of customization) to the SDD. I have an 8gb SD card, and less than 8gb of data. I don't have an external optical drive, but I do have an external HDD. Is it possible to do this? If so, how?

 

Well yeah, I've been considering buying a 16gb faster SD card, with the 4gb on the other slot that would be 20gb which would mostly do the trick, 8gb on the ssd be damned. But that's 35€ and I honestly can't afford it right now. But you're right lotus, ubuntu has the advantage of being able to do every possible thing you might need, that's why I'm not considering a lighter distro but a hardware upgrade.

libssd, what you want to this is definitely possible. From the top of my head I would try to investigate the following. Making a live distro out your current install assuming that it's possible not to just to run it but to install it on a drive. Making an image of the partition and then writing to a new place (I've done this with disk images, so this might be possible). Checking if your customization is reduced to files in the home folder, at which point you can just copy all the content of the home and then substitute the new home folder on a fresh install with your old one.

 

Another option would be to back up your 32 GB partition using something like fsarchiver or partimage, then restore it to whatever device you want. Note - last I used it, partimage only restores into a partition at least as large as the partition from which you backed up. On the other hand, fsarchiver just needs an appropriate amount of space in the restore partition.
Because I run development versions of Ubuntu and Fedora on my AOA150 that, every so often, totally bork themselves when updating, I back up working configurations (using fsarchiver) on a regular basis to allow for easy restoration. It's come in handy more than once!

 

Thanks for the suggestion. Disaster recovery is not if but when. I will look into fsarchiver.

 

Check the apt cache (/var/cache/apt/archives), it can take a lot of unnecessary space. You can safely remove all the debs there but when you reinstall a package it has to be downloaded again. FSlint is also a nice tool to help you clean your system (find duplicate files etc.)

Removing stuff like gnome-games-common, evolution or openoffice might also be fun if you're looking for that extra bit of harddisk space.

 

@Ceno: only 2693MB for Karmic Koala on my AOA150. I can send you the list of installed debs if that would help.