Tidying up apt-get

The first method is to simply clean up your apt-get cache. You will only find this usefull if you’ve installed and removed programs on your machine; otherwise, I doubt it will do a thing, as the cache will already be empty. Numerous users have seen large amounts of space freed up from this, whilst others have barely seen a change. Therefore it’s not too difficult to conclude that results will vary. This process is very simple and is, in theory, completely harmless and no issues will ever arise due to its use.

All you need to do is fire up a terminal and run the following two commands:

sudo apt-get autoremove

sudo apt-get clean

The autoremove command will remove any orphaned packages; packages that are installed, but are not used by anything and can’t be used on their own. The clean command will then clean out the package cache.

Removing unneeded drivers

Be warned, this is an advanced method and doesn’t really give you much space back. As the video driver folder is only 5 megabytes in the first place; but even 5 megabytes are precious when you only have 4000 in the first place.

Please note that removing drivers that are needed will cause serious problems to your system. So I’d leave this one to those who know what they are doing (so make sure you know what you doing!) To be on the safe side I believe all the drivers referencing amd, ati, s3, nv, and savage are removable. As the Eee Pc doesn’t use any AMD, ATI, S3, or nVidia components.

To get to the folder in question, with the permission to delete files use this command in the terminal:

sudo nautilus /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/

Compressing the usr directory

You’ll notice the usr directory is massive, even without doing anything to the operating system. It will most likely stand around 1.5GB for most users, and even if this only gets a third of that back it will be a great improvement.

The following information was originally by Paul Battley, I’ve made the odd change here and there. As I found the original guide to be so good I decided to use it as a base for the information provided here.

squashfs lets you compress a filesystem, but it’s read-only. unionfs, meanwhile, allows you to overlay a writable filesystem on top to allow changes to the data. Obviously, the more you change the data, the more disk space is used, but it’s always possible to recompress and recover the space later on. So, you’d be better off installing and removing all the packages you think you will want, before running this process; in addition, it’s probably a good idea to run this process every now and again. Personally, I believe every 6 months will probably suffice, but this would vary depending on how much you change the installed components.

All the commands I’m going to give here need to be run as root, and I’m going to assume basic Linux competence. If it doesn’t make sense to you, you probably shouldn’t try it!

In order to run as root, run the following command

sudo su

You will then be asked for your password, please avoid using this command often. It makes it easy to break your system!

Step 1 is to install a couple of packages:

apt-get install squashfs-tools unionfs-tools

Then make a space for your compressed filesystem and overlay:

mkdir -p /.filesystems/usr/overlay

And compress your filesystem:

mksquashfs /usr /.filesystems/usr/usr.sqfs

Add these lines to /etc/modules:

unionfs
squashfs
loop

… and these lines to /etc/fstab:

/.filesystems/usr/usr.sqfs /usr squashfs ro,loop,nodev 0 0
unionfs /usr unionfs nodev,noatime,dirs=/.filesystems/usr/overlay=rw:/usr=ro 0 0

Next, reboot from a live distribution on a USB stick, CD, or SD card, mount the internal root partition, and move aside the old /usr directory:

mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
mv /mnt/sda1/usr /mnt/sda1/usr.old
mkdir /mnt/sda1/usr

Reboot from the internal disk. Did it work? Then you can remove the /usr.old directory to reclaim the space.

Again thanks to Paul Battley for the compression information.

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Post tags: eee pc, eeexubuntu, free hard drive space, shrinking operating system

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