On 09/11/18 19:30, Bev Nicolson wrote:
- Noticing that this PC gets glacially slow occasionally (it probably
means get a new one and soon but bear with me for the moment) I had a look at the hard disk. 77 GB is 84.4% full. I have two partitions though. One 'extended partition', the other a swap partition. Both 3.1 GB. Could I unmount the first (extended partition) safely?
Unlikely. If you have 77Gb but two partitions both 3.1GB then the maths doesn't work out. I suspect your disk is partitioned with a primary partition of 77GB and the 3.1GB extended partition is (for all intents and purposes) also the swap partition. Linux usually needs the swap partition, so I recommend not messing with it.
[Explanation. You can skip this] Old style disks could have up to 4 partitions on them. Usually the first is marked as the Bootable partition. People got fed up with only being able to have 4 partitions, so came up with a tweak. The normal style partitions were called Primary Partitions and a new type of partition was invented called an Extended partition. Extended partitions can have lots of "logical partitions" in them. Ubuntu used to install itself with 1 primary partition with the / directory in it. It them used to create an extended partition, and into this create one extended partition with the swap file in it. No space (or hardly any) is wasted with this setup.
You may be able to visually see your disk layout if you use gparted or the gnome disk utility (on the menu as "Disks". Don't change anything though! [End of explanation]
- What is it full of and how could I clear stuff out, again, safely?
Temporary files. Cruft.
Sorry - glib answers. Firstly, if you keep your machine up-to-date on updates, but don't tidy it up, you are likely to have lots of old kernel files installed. It's easy to see this if you have the synaptic package manager installed. (apt-get install synaptic if you haven't!) start synaptic. On the left hand side select the line saying "Installed" Scroll the right-hand list until you get to entries listed linux. You will probably find entries listed linux-headers, linux-modules and linux-image and possibly linux-tools. These are followed by a version number. These numbers are linux version numbers.
{DON'T DO THIS UNLESS YOU'RE SURE - Read the rest of the post first} Right click on the ones with the smaller numbers and choose Mark for removal. Leave the higher numbers - I tend to leave 2 or 3 of the most recent versions. I'm currently running 4.15.0-38.41. I'm showing an older version 4.15.0-36.39
If you want to proceed, press "Apply" button. It should list only linux packages to be removed, but nothing else. If something else is listed, then something has gone wrong. Stop and try again.
Alternative tools: Find and install Ubuntu Tweak. Beware, it's old & not updated any more. If you find it and install it, go to the Janitor Tab. You can clear Web Browser Caches, image caches, Apt Cache, Old Kernel files, and unneeded packages.
Other ways to delete necessary files A still-updated tool is Bleachbit. Run it (not as root). OK on the first box, then on the 2nd It's safe to tick most cache tickboxes Do not select Deep Scan Press Preview, and it will show you what it can delete. If you're happy, press Clean.
If you're happy, you can repeat using the root-mode version but be more careful.
There's also a tool called Baobab, which shows up on the menus as "Disk Usage Analyser". This scans directories and shows you what's the biggest. It may help point you at the disk-hogs.
Hope that helps. Don't delete stuff if you're not sure. Backup first, be careful etc etc
I'm not here very often currently, so if you ask a question about this, please also cc me in.
Cheers Steve