[TriLUG] Disk cleanup

[John Matthews]

On Mon, 2002-03-18 at 12:57, Justin Johnson wrote:
> 1.) What the h@|| is taking up > #GB on my hard drive? I installed RHL 7.2
> and it's updated to the current kernel release from RH. Can I remove the
> older kernel packages safely? If so, do I need to do anything beyond
> uninstall the package? ( I use gnorpm for most of my dealings with this kind
> of stuff) I've already started going through the list of packages and
> uninstalling things I know I don't use, as I just want to get rid of as much
> crap as possible.

My kludgey way of finding out where disk space is being spent is (as
root):

du --max-depth=1 -h /

That'll show you how much space each of the directories off of / is
using. Then you can move one level deep (e.g. into /usr) and repeat the
process to find out what's big in there.

Among the things you can probably remove that you don't use is probably
any LaTeX stuff, old kernel source trees, foreign language packages you
don't use, and desktop artwork. I also use only one type of desktop
(GNOME) so I blow away all the KDE stuff to save space on my laptop. If
you aren't building things on the system, I believe that you can remove
almost all *-devel packages. But it will be annoying if you ever have to
go back and build something and all the *-devel packages that it depends
on have to be installed again.

I'm almost sure there is a way to get RPM to sort all the packages
installed by size, but I have no clue how to do it. Perhaps the RPM
gurus can help on that front.

Regards,
matt

-- 
Matt Matthews     \ ph: 919.660.2811        \ Use GNU/Linux  _o) w00t
Duke Univ., Postdoc\ jvmatthe at math.duke.edu  \____________   /\\
Dept. of Mathematics\ http://www.math.duke.edu/~jvmatthe/ \ _\_V