How to save on precious HDD space

If you have installed peppermint on a spacious 80 GB HDD this tip may not seem like a big thing to you. However, if like me you are running Peppermint on a eeepc with a 4 GB (or 2 GB) HDD you will want to save as much space as possible.

First things first, considering that DropBox has a default of 2 GB of disk space (or more if you have invited people and they accepted the invites) you might not want to configure it (not that I could get DropBox to work either, but just as well considering the small HDD).

The second tip comes from my friend, Quintin, check his blog at www.g33q.co.za . I understand it like this: when you update or install new packages the package files are downloaded to this location: /var/cache/apt/archives , and after installation they stay there. Jealously hogging what little disk space you have available. The solution? delete them! (so far this has not harmed my Peppermint Linux, that I can tell)

But this is easier said than done. Firstly you need to be root to delete files from here, so here follow the steps:

Run PCManFM

go to folder: /var/cache/apt/archives

look at all the .deb files

right click on them, then click on delete

error message - you are not root!

OK, so click on Tools > "Open current folder in terminal"

type in sudo rm *.deb press

(be very careful what you do as root user, you have been warned)

Enter the password for root user

The files are now gone! If you deleted them without using Terminal, (ie. Tools > Open current folder as root) they would have been sent to /root/.local/share/Trash/files folder , then you would have had to log into that folder via Terminal and delete them. As even when logged in as root user I was not able to delete the files through PCManFm.

Don't think your temp files mean very much? After 3 days of updates and installing OpenOffice, VLC and a few other programs I had over 300 MB of package files! That means that 13% of my HDD was occupied by files I did not need ...

So if you are running low on disk space, check this out.