Not enought space to do updates and worse

jmacg · **Posted:** Wed Nov 04, 2009 8:55 am

Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions, although unfortunately the thread went dead when I reported that installing onto the 16Gb SSD had made my machine unusable because it would no longer boot.

I've solved the situation in the end. But only by switching back entirely to the 4Gb SSD. Installing everything to the 16Gb SSD made the machine unuseable. I tried to go the manual way and have some stuff on both drives, as per suggestions from some people. That proved very difficult for a non Linux expert. I was presented with more options people didn't warn me about, that I didn't understand, and I would have had to ask a whole lot more questions. This whole installations options area could be made a lot friendlier.

So before boring you all with more dumb questions, I decided to try installing Eeebuntu 3.0 Base again on the 4Gb drive - i.e. accepting the default. First I deleted all partitions with GParted, so at least I was starting out with a clean slate. It installed OK (and it boots - yay!). I was able to add the extra apps I wanted and still have just under 1Gb to spare.

I'm hoping this will be OK for me now. I suspect that my original installation of Eeebuntu 3.0 Base, several months ago, didn't reformat the 4Gb drive and it retained a fair bit of stuff left over from the original Xandros installation. It got so crammed that eventually it was unuseable. I think upgraders from Xandros need to be warned about this, and given simple instructions for how to wipe everything off their drive before starting.

The only thing that still isn't right - and I'm hoping someone can tell me how to fix it - is that when I reboot, I get the American Megatrends screen, which ends with a "Press F1 to resume" message. How can I make it move on automatically, without pressing F1, as it always used to?

barrieluv · **Posted:** Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:50 am

jmacg wrote:

I think upgraders from Xandros need to be warned about this, and given simple instructions for how to wipe everything off their drive before starting.

The default Xandros install has a recovery partition which is often missed by users during formatting for another distro.

jmacg wrote:

The only thing that still isn't right - and I'm hoping someone can tell me how to fix it - is that when I reboot, I get the American Megatrends screen, which ends with a "Press F1 to resume" message. How can I make it move on automatically, without pressing F1, as it always used to?

Make sure that Quick Boot and Quiet Boot options are set to Enabled in the BIOS.

jmacg · **Posted:** Wed Nov 04, 2009 7:17 pm

barrieluv wrote:

jmacg wrote:

The only thing that still isn't right - and I'm hoping someone can tell me how to fix it - is that when I reboot, I get the American Megatrends screen, which ends with a "Press F1 to resume" message. How can I make it move on automatically, without pressing F1, as it always used to?

Make sure that Quick Boot and Quiet Boot options are set to Enabled in the BIOS.

Both of those are enabled, so the problem lies somewhere else.

tbone · **Posted:** Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:38 am

BobGod8 wrote:

I'm going to assume your 16GB drive is mounted at /media/HOME/, although that may not be the case. To find out where it's mounted, type df at a command prompt, find the ~16GB one, and look to the right to see where it's mounted.

Assuming it's at /media/HOME, the temporary solution would be

Code:

sudo mv /var/cache/apt /media/HOME/
sudo ln -s /media/HOME/cache /var/apt/

This will move the folder and create a link in its place.

When you're done updating, if you want to restore the folder (you don't have to, you can just leave it the way it is permanently if you want), do the following:

Code:

sudo rm /var/cache/apt
sudo mv /media/HOME/cache /var/apt/

Though this solution can be made permanent (by just not removing the link and moving back), it's not optimal. Optimal solution is to move to a different partition, then have that partition mounted at /var/cache/apt

Another solution for you may be to have the packages downloaded to RAM. If you've upgraded your RAM to 2GB, you have more than sufficient space to use a RAMdisk. If you mv the cache folder to a RAMdisk, it doesn't take up real space anywhere, and gets wiped every reboot. If you're interested in that, /dev/shm is already a RAMdisk, you'd simply move your cache folder there instead of /media/HOME

Good luck!

I added the bold text. I have similar issues with a lack of space on my primary partition and I DO have 2Gb of RAM.

I tried to follow these instructions and got an error message after the second command. (I didn't record the message). The result of this is that my /var/cache/apt folder seems to have vaniched. When I try to undo the change as per the instructions above (or if I try to re-issue the commands) I get an "mv: cannot stat `/var/cache/apt': No such file or directory" error.

What has happened to my /var/cache/apt and how can I get it back?

I w0uld also like to know if there are any other temporary or cache directories that I could move to the /dev/shm to increase space on my 4Gb partition. I have already moved my /home directory to the secondary partition...

EDIT. This problem appears to be larger then I first realised as I can't open Synaptic Package Manager, or update my repositories without /var/cache/apt...

Not enought space to do updates and worse

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