Bloated Mint Install . . . or bad Swap?

[JAK]

Everyone in my house has their own computer in their bedroom, but I have a common computer in the family room that everyone shares just web-surfing mostly-- quick/convenient reference. Long ago when I had PCLOS installed on it I made only a 5-GB partition (dual boot with Windows). A few weeks back I overwrote the PCLOS partition with Mint and everything was fine up until a few days ago. Not realizing how little space 5-GB's is for and OS these days, I loaded the Penguin Racer game for my son. Although it's a fun game, it made web-surfing difficult because it filled the hard drive to 100%. There wasn't even enough resources to watch a YouTube video.

Realizing this problem I deleted the Penguin Racer but that didn't seem to help, so I started deleting every application on the computer except for FireFox, Mplayer, OpenOffice, and the system utilities. Everything else is removed... no games, no music players, etc.... For whatever reason, removing all those applications did not help in getting back more HD space, Mint still is taking up 5-GB's with almost nothing installed. I had to resort to cutting my swap space in half to give more HD space for Mint and it's still at 92% full.

How is this possible? How can a bare-bones install of Mint take up 5-GB's of HD space? Yes, I used the "apt-get autoremove" but that didn't get me much. Any ideas?
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[Andy Mack]

Try sudo apt-get autoclean

[McLovin]

Did you remember to add a swap partition when you installed Mint? I know it seems like it's something obvious, but I have made that mistake, and I've been using Linux for years, it just slips your mind sometimes.

[JAK]

Did you remember to add a swap partition when you installed Mint? I know it seems like it's something obvious, but I have made that mistake, and I've been using Linux for years, it just slips your mind sometimes.

The autoclean removed a few things, but the system is still showing 100% filled. As for creating a swap partition, it's there, I just don't think it's being used. I'm a bit of a noob, so please forgive my ignorance. Here is my fstab:

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# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/hda3
UUID=6ca0d179-d660-497b-ad3c-dffeb65bc63e /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/hda1
UUID=BE60CC93E000E1C3 /media/hda1     ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       1
# /dev/hda5
UUID=50F5-2298  /media/hda5     vfat    defaults,utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0       1
# /dev/hda4
UUID=4bac7051-97fc-4832-8b03-584aeeca5d11 /swap           swap    defaults        0       2
/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto,exec 0       0

.... and here is my df listing:

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Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3              6191268   5953968     48620 100% /
varrun                  517816        88    517728   1% /var/run
varlock                 517816         0    517816   0% /var/lock
udev                    517816        64    517752   1% /dev
devshm                  517816         0    517816   0% /dev/shm
lrm                     517816     23908    493908   5% /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/volatile
/dev/hda1             25262180  21054840   4207340  84% /media/hda1
/dev/hda5             46071104  15207264  30863840  34% /media/hda5
fusesmb                6191268   5953968     48620 100% /home/user/Network

... and my blkid:

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/dev/hda1: UUID="BE60CC93E000E1C3" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/hda3: UUID="6ca0d179-d660-497b-ad3c-dffeb65bc63e" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" 
/dev/hda4: TYPE="swap" UUID="4bac7051-97fc-4832-8b03-584aeeca5d11" 
/dev/hda5: LABEL="DATA" UUID="50F5-2298" TYPE="vfat" 

Are there any obvious problems with this?
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[Fred]

sudo apt-get clean

Fred

[JAK]

sudo apt-get clean

Nope. That didn't do anything. I was just looking over my own computer as well and I can't tell if the swap partition is being used on this machine either. How can you tell? Gparted reports a swap partition of 5 gigs , but I noticed it doesn't show it as being mounted. I'm a bit confused about this obviously. When I install Mint, I used the "use entire disk" option.
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[Fred]

JAK,

Look in /etc/fstab and see if you have a mounting line in there for your swap partition. If you do, check the UUID to make sure it is correct.

In a terminal:

sudo vol_id -u /dev/sdxx

Substitute the correct drive letter and partition number and it will give you the correct UUID for that partition.

Fred

[MagnusB]

Run the disk space analyser (or whatever it is called) and check which folders that take all the space. I guess a bit of cleaning in /var/apt and /var/logs is in order, maybe some of the hidden folders.
As for the installation size, I think the 700MB ISO comes with about 2 GB of software, and 4 GB is the minimum recommend installation partition, around 10 GB is the maximum you'll ever need on a root partition (if you use a separate home partition).

[JAK]

I'll try resizing the partitions and see how well that goes. Since the Windows partition is not getting much use, I can steal a bit more space from that. I'll bump it up to 10 or 15 gigs. I just find it very strange that the system is using so much HD space for so very few applications and taking another 500mb from the swap partition didn't help at all.... it's still at 100% usage.
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[MagnusB]

It might be something wrong with the file system, have you tried fsck?
EDIT:
There are some hidden folders that usually build up a sizable amount of MB, for instance /home/user/.thumbnails

[JAK]

It might be something wrong with the file system, have you tried fsck?
EDIT:
There are some hidden folders that usually build up a sizable amount of MB, for instance /home/user/.thumbnails

Being new to Linux, I don't want to muck around where I don't know what I'm doing. I'd hate to manually delete files and not have my system work after that. What does fsck do and what syntax should I use? I tried running it but was warned it should not be used on a mounted filesystem.
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[MagnusB]

Code: Select all

fsck /dev/hda3

Should do the trick, it checks the filesystem for errors.

[JAK]

Problem solved.... sort of. I had an 80gb HD hanging around so I put it in the computer and installed Mint from scratch. I created a 78gb partition and a 2gb partition for swap but I can't seem to get Mint to see the swap partition. You would think that is automatic. It keeps coming up [FAIL] during boot and it doesn't show up when I list the mounts.
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EDIT: Refer to this thread for the solution: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... 42&t=10941
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