After installing pacman packages (last one was ‘ungoogled-chromium’) my root partition of 20GB is completly full. Now I can’t update new packages.

My partition structure is: root (20GB) /home (470GB) swap (10GB)

How can I delete the garbage that is piling up in my root, and how to prevent it from happening again.

  • Yote.zip@pawb.socialEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Run ncdu (CLI) or Filelight (GUI) on your / and see what’s taking up all that space first, then we can figure out what to do about it.

    • Tw1@lemmy.roembol.nlOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      This realy helped my out. /var/cache/pacman took up over 5GB of space in my root partition. To prevent this from happening again, is there a way to move pacman cache to my home partition where I have over 300GB of space for pacman to consume?

  • Dr_Willis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    31·
    2 years ago

    check to see howuch space your log files are using.

    to prevent it from happening …

    I would consider 20GB for / to be too small for long term desktop use.

    and with just 470GB for /home, I would not split the two up.

    • Tw1@lemmy.roembol.nlOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      log files only took up 800MB, but I fixed most of the problems now, by setting up pacman to put the cache in the home partition.

      You are right, it was better to leave /home in the same partition, but now it is difficult to chance that. I thought it had advantages when something goes wrong with my root i can swap it out, but it only caused problems for me. Why do so many people split up there /home then? I thought it was common practice.

      • it_a_me@literature.cafe
        1·
        2 years ago

        The main advantage of having a /home partition is that you can easily preserve it during reinstalls or during a distro hop. Reinstalls used to be more common in the past when some distros didn’t allow full distro upgrades without reinstalling. See this result which is still ranked #1 on duckduckgo

        I personally use a @home btrfs subvolume which has most of the same advantages to me, and additionally allows @home and @root to share the same partition. It also allows me to use luks on everthing without bothering with lvm.

  • mrmojo@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    Just in case you use Docker, you should clean images and containers on disk. They usually live on the root partition and take huge amounts of space.

  • christophski@feddit.ukEnglish
    31·
    2 years ago

    Not sure about arch but one thing I’ve found takes up a fair amount of space is older kernel versions that remain installed

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    In addition to everything else, if you’re not using hibernate you could reclaim some of the swap partition, 10 GB is completely wasted.

    I would delete and merge the swap space into root if they’re neighbors. You can create swap files instead of any size you want, and place them anywhere you want, like /home.

    I would recommend starting with 1 GB of swap and see how much is actually being used.

    To create and use a swap file:

    • Use dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024 to create a file.
    • Use mkswap to format the swap file.
    • Use swapon /swapfile to activate it.
    • Add /swapfile none swap sw 0 0 in /etc/fstab to activate on every reboot.
    • yum13241@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 years ago

      Because you don’t need to dd your entire /home partition to a drive, wipe your system drive, then dd your /home back.

  • Roshakk@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    You can start to delete pachage caches, and see how much you gain… If not done often you can have a pile of old stuff. Check out the paccache arch wiki page for more info!

    • c0mpost@lemmy.eco.br
      0·
      2 years ago

      This. You might have to clear up some space before installing pacman-contrib though.

      paccache -rk1 once in a while and you’re good, maybe even create a hook

  • wallmenis@lemmy.oneEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    One quick suggestion is running sudo pacman -Sc. Also switch to flatpak on some apps since these are stored in /home. If these don’t work/are not suitable to your situation, give more information like mentioned on the other comments.