Mageia forum

I currently have a 12 gig root partition that is almost full. I do not have enough space to install a few things. I read that it is unwise to remove orphaned packages using urpme auto-orphans so I'm leery about doing that to clean up older packages. Is there any good way to remove old packages or do I just have to increase the dive space and just let them keep piling up?

Removing orphans may not resolve the space problem. (You would need to have a great many packages installed to occupy 12gig.) It might be informative to find out which directories are taking up the space. Enter as root:

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du -akx / | sort -nr | head -n 25

This will show the size of the 25 largest directories in /, and may confirm whether or not removing packages will help to resolve the problem.

It is safe to remove orphans - provided you carefully examine the list, make sure that none of them is actually needed and that no essential packages will be removed as dependencies. The safest approach is probably to go through the list, one package at a time, and if you are sure that you don't need it remove it using:

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rpm -e --nodeps packagename

Jim

For orphans, better have a look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Removing_packages