[wellylug] Where is my disk space?

[michael at diaspora.gen.nz]

>Mac: double click the HD icon and read the info at the top of the window, or
>'Cmd I' on the icon of the disk.
>Then view the folders by size (as the folders are label "Applications",
>Documents", "System" etc you can tell what's in them).
>Select the ones you don't want (ie Games/Doom) and delete it

Hmmmm, yes, good point.  Come to think of it, Windows folders do this
if you right click on them and get their properties; although they chug
for a while, as they collect the disk space stats.

>This is what I want to know.

Are you using KDE or Gnome?  Either have an equivalent to the Finder --
Nautilus under Gnome.  They might have an equivalent action (don't know,
don't use either myself).

>I still don't know where the space has gone... I thought a FULL install was
>around 4.5Gb but I have nothing left out of a 20Gb disk.

Looking at your original message, you say "I can't do anymore updates
because I have no disk space left."

What's telling you you don't have any more disk space left?  The updater
tool?  What does it say exactly?  What's the updater tool, for that
matter?

Bear in mind that you may have multiple partitions, and all it could
be complaining about is lack of space in one partition; for example,
one of my boxes has the following partitions:

    Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
    /dev/hda3               141483     30450    103727  23% /
    /dev/hda2               198123        54    187838   1% /tmp
    /dev/hdc1               495777    376037     94133  80% /var
    /dev/hdc2              1015022    437780    524795  46% /usr
    /dev/hdc3              2583696   2072023    378074  85% /home

And if I tried to download more than, say, 95MB of updates into /var,
the update tool would quite rightly decide it was out of disk space.
(/var being the usual place for temporary files that aren't quite
temporary enough for /tmp, like, say, updated versions of rpms.)