On 19-Jun-06 Wayne Stallwood wrote:

I think this question may have come up on the list before, but I can't find an answer in the archives.

/dev/sda3 111G 102G 3.1G 98% /home

Why is my free space only shown as 3.1G if I have used 102G out of 111 ?

Hi Wayne, I don't know the answer (in the proper sense of know), but it seems that this sort of apparent shortfall is normal. For example, here are some 'df' results from 2 of my machines:

A: Filesystem blocks Used Available U + A % of blocks /dev/hda1 7932792 1536926 5984604 7252530 94.8% /dev/hdc4 2405967 2051686 229894 2281580 94.8% /dev/hdb2 3989159 2759955 1022816 3782771 94.8%

B: /dev/hda3 19022364 14249156 3806900 18056056 94.9% /dev/hda1 23302 3279 18820 22099 94.8% /dev/hdb3 17624856 14257172 2472380 16729552 94.9%

So generally Used + Available comes to almost 95% of the total blocks on the filesystem. My guess is that the remaining 5% is "filesystem overheads" like the inode tables and whatever else is fixed when the filesystem is set up, and can't be used as "data space" -- i.e. is not available. And presumably "Used" refers to the amount of usable space, not the total on thr FS.

In your case (modulo rounding) Used + Available = 105.1 which is 94.7% of the total blocks-- just like mine!

BTW Windows Vista is a disk space hog, a clean installation into a virtual machine took 8GB (minus 840MB for virtual memory)

That's before you add any apps (and office 12 is Huge)

And I bet that implies hugely RAM-hungry as well! I do hope lots of people upgrade to Vista -- that should lead to a lot of Vista-inadequate (but more than Linux-adequate) kit coming cheap onto the second-hand market.

Best wishes, Ted.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Jun-06 Time: 10:48:53 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------