• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Linux mint

Iam sitting in the train from aarhus to Copenhagen Airport on my way to work.

My laptop have never been able to log onto the train wireless networ.
This time I tried starting with my new Mandriva cd, and it works!!:)
 
I have installed ubunto as a 2. or 3. opperating system.
Something must have gone wrong.
The updatehandeling want to install 141Mb, and need 401Mb, that sounds like unzipping, ok.

Opgradering skal bruge 401M fri plads på disk "/". Frigør mindst 401M disk plads på "/". Tøm papirkurven og fjern midlertidige pakker fra tidligere installationer ved at bruge "sudo apt-get clean".
Click to expand...
I have no idea what drive "/" is, the wastepaperbasket is emty and I have found the console and run "sudo apt-get clean"

When installing it asked for specifications on partitions, I gave it 7,5Gb plus the 2,5 free. (there were like 15Gb free?)

Now I have 0 on file system, 1,1Gb on 3,8Gbmedia whatever that is, and 7,6Gb on partition_1.

Apart from not being able to update, my firefox does not remember bookmarks, and the desktop start clean at booting. Looks like I am missing space for changes in settings?
 
Toke said:
I have installed ubunto as a 2. or 3. opperating system.
Something must have gone wrong.
The updatehandeling want to install 141Mb, and need 401Mb, that sounds like unzipping, ok.


I have no idea what drive "/" is, the wastepaperbasket is emty and I have found the console and run "sudo apt-get clean"

When installing it asked for specifications on partitions, I gave it 7,5Gb plus the 2,5 free. (there were like 15Gb free?)

Now I have 0 on file system, 1,1Gb on 3,8Gbmedia whatever that is, and 7,6Gb on partition_1.

Apart from not being able to update, my firefox does not remember bookmarks, and the desktop start clean at booting. Looks like I am missing space for changes in settings?
Click to expand...

/ is the root partition. It's where a linux OS boots from. sounds to me like your /var is full (or /var has filled up the rest of your root partition by itself enlarging too much.) try the following commands to figure out where the problem is:

cd /

df -h *

du -sh *
 
Filsystem Størr Brugt Tilb Brug% Monteret på
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
udev 1006M 156K 1006M 1% /dev
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
proc 0 0 0 - /proc
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
sysfs 0 0 0 - /sys
overflow 1,0M 16K 1008K 2% /tmp
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
/dev/sda5 9,4G 9,0G 0 100% /
toke@Toke-laptop:/$
toke@Toke-laptop:/$ du -sh *
Click to expand...
I got this?
 
toke@Toke-laptop:~$ du -sh *
4,0K Billeder
5,1G Documents
4,0K Dokumenter
836K Energy Bliss.jpg
4,0K examples.desktop
4,0K Music
4,0K Musik
4,0K Offentligt
4,0K Pictures
4,0K README.TXT
4,0K Skabeloner
4,0K Skrivebord
64K Stonehenge.jpg
4,0K Videoklip
toke@Toke-laptop:~$
Click to expand...
This.

The var file is 223Mb
I specified 10Gb total for linux, isn that enough?
 
I have found a program called Gparted
The grafic indicate that linux is on /dev/sda3, which is divided into /dev/sda5
and /dev/sda6
they are 9.49Gb with 424.92Mb free, and 478.47Mb (swapfile)

Looks like I can change /dev/sda1 (partition_1) but not the others as I cant dismount them.
 
I just found 1.4Gb of movie to delete under filesystem my documents.

ETA:
Filesystem home toke
It must have copied some stuff from windows and stopped when full.
 
Last edited:
Yes according to the outputs your bulk was in Documents.

Side note: In ubuntu there is a disk useage analyzer in the accessories menu, that will also do this. Since I spend most of my days at the command prompt, I prefer that tool. YMMV.

I was wrong, Var is not full, it seems to have been your documents folder with the bulk of it. When I get a chance, what I will do is find a tutorial for you to be able to mount your documents folders in your Windows partition (since this is a multiple boot machine) and set that as your home directory. This would be scripted at start up. That would help you 1) keep your files in one place, and 2) not fill your linux partitions with things you would be doubling up on.

I'll see if I can find the page I am thinking of or just post the script/changed fstab for that on boot here.
 
Thanks, that sounds nice.
I overlooked the G at documents, and found it by chance.:o
 
Ok general help for this issue:


Use a single data store when dual booting.

The above link also show how to share firefox profiles/IM buddy lists, etc. between the two.

This site has lots of good tweaks for you to dual boot with Ubuntu.


Please note that lots of tutorials/tweaks for Debian will work under ubuntu and linux mint, as they are both Debian forks. That said a few days ago I added links to the Ubuntu community documentation (which also links to the ubuntu forum) and some linux/freeBSD/etc. tutorial sites. You should check those new links and search for something along the lines of "Mount My Documents as home directory dual boot" (without quotes.)
 
Damn what is the name of those little mints they give you at Olive Garden?
Sorry couldn't resist!
 
Toke said:
This.

The var file is 223Mb
I specified 10Gb total for linux, isn that enough?
Click to expand...
That should be enough, I guess. But as you see, a couple of movies takes more disk space than all your programs taken together.

BTW, you did a 'du -sh *' on your home directory. Ducky had asked that you first r files do a 'cd /', which takes you to the 'root directory', which is the top directory of your entire filesystem.

Let's first look at how Windows organizes it. When you open the Windows Explorer, you can click on an icon for drive "C". Then you get a window with the list of files and folders (=directories) in the top directory of drive C. One of them is "Program Files". If you click on that one, you get another window with the files and folders in that one: say, "Adobe", "Office", etc. In effect, the files on drive "C" are organized like a tree, where every branch in your tree is a folder, and a sub-branch of that a sub-folder. On the command-line, you separate all folder names by a backslash, like
Code: 
> del "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader.exe"
Now, in Linux it mostly works the same, only the separator for the directory (=folder) names is a forward slash / instead of a backslash \. The top directory in Linux is '/'. If you look at it with, e.g.,
Code: 
ls /
you'll see its contents are largely again directories named 'bin', 'home', 'var', etc. The directory 'home' contains on its turn a directory 'toke', which is the directory where your personal stuff resides. The full name of that directory toke is then
Code: 
/home/toke
in which you can see the whole path from the top directory.

The second difference is that Windows keeps a separate tree for every drive or partition. That's why you see the "drive letters", in the above example C, at the start of filenames in Windows. Linux makes them into one big tree.

Suppose you wanted more disk space and you put a second disk into your machine. You partition that disk and you want to use its first partition to put all your own documents on. What you'd then do is first to "format" the partition:
Code: 
# mkfs /dev/sdb1
This is the equivalent of "format" under Windows. It puts all necessary administration on the partition, like making an (empty) top directory. So far, no surprises. However, just doing a 'mkfs' doesn't make the files visible to Linux. But then comes the magic; the second command you'd do is
Code: 
# mount /dev/sdb1 /home
This now hangs the whole tree of directories and files on this second partition under the directory /home. So, when you want to play the movie with the name "/home/toke/Movies/mymovie.avi", Linux looks at that name and sees it starts with "/home", so it knows he should look on that new partition /dev/sdb1. There, he looks for a directory 'toke', and in that directory for the subdirectory 'Movies', and finally in that directory for a file named 'mymovie.avi'. Of course now, the contents of the directory '/home' on your original partition are invisible, so if you already had stuff there you'd have to mount the new partition elsewhere (e.g., under /mnt), move the stuff, then unmount the new partition and mount it again on the intended spot.

Most Linux installers nowadays offer to make one big partition for all Linux stuff. However, conventional wisdom among Linux/Unix specialists says to make several partitions; in particular to make separate partitions for:

/home: this is where the users' home directories go. You don't want a user taking up all your disk space (at least when you're administering a multi-user machine)

/var: this is where the logfiles go, and where all kinds of temporary files go, like the file you sent to the printer, or the emails you've just downloaded from your ISP, or the extra software packages you want to install.

/tmp: this is where the really temporary stuff goes. This directory gets cleaned between reboots (or at least, can get cleaned).

These three are the places most likely to have unexpected growth.

GodMark2 above mentioned the file /etc/fstab - that's where you write down which partitions should go where in the big tree of the Linux filesystem. It could look like this:
Code: 
/dev/sda3         /
/dev/sda2         /usr
/dev/sda1         /var
/dev/sdb1         /home
/dev/sdb2         /tmp
/dev/hda           /media/cdrom
and then on startup, Linux automatically makes those partitions visible in the big filesystem tree. Yes, when you look at the actual file you'll see it has a couple of more columns, which I've now left out. Actually, one of those columns says it shouldn't automatically try to mount your CD-ROM drive. :)

Toke said:
I have found a program called Gparted
The grafic indicate that linux is on /dev/sda3, which is divided into /dev/sda5
and /dev/sda6
they are 9.49Gb with 424.92Mb free, and 478.47Mb (swapfile)

Looks like I can change /dev/sda1 (partition_1) but not the others as I cant dismount them.
Click to expand...
If you want more disk space for Linux, look at the gparted live disk.Then you can boot off that live disk and it can change the size of all your partitions. It rocks. I bought a new laptop a month ago, with Vista on it, and Vista's own tool refused to resize its partition smaller than 100GB - although there was "only" 60GB installed on it. Gparted did the job :)
 
ddt: Thanks for getting more granular than I did with the explanation of the linux file structure. That's a good post for newbies, and I often forget to step back to that level when needed.
 
I have just deleted files moved some to external hardisk and defragmented under windows.
The idea was to start with my livecd and use the Gparted to make a bigger linux partition, that way I can store downloads under linux and demote windows to games only.

After figuring out to unswap\unmount the swapfile it was ready to go, but found some problem.
It seams to be the files for steam that cannot be propperly defragmented.

Well, it looks like I can solve my problems by not using windows for anything other than games, and then uninstall, resize partisions and reinstall steam, when I get home.

(Steam is a copyprotection and multiplayer program shared by several newer games for windows.
I am not the only one having problems with it.)
 
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