The ever growing root partition

[rodgoslin]

Now that Mga 6 is nearly on us, I'm giving some thought to updating. But there is a snag. Through time, I've noticed a steady increase in the contents of the root partition, and a consequent reduction in the free space. As of now, the initial install size of around 7GB, has swollen to just short of 12GB, and there's insufficient spare space to update. In the past, I've got round this by doing a full install, and, in effect started again, from scratch. But, this seems to be getting more difficult with time, and it's not easy to remember exactly what had been initially installed and what had been installed since then.
I'd very much like to find what this extra 5GB is and how to get rid. 5GB is a lot of installs, and I've been in this for a long time and my original build pretty well covers all that I commonly use. Yes, there are quite a lot of unremoved orphans, but I learned the hard way to be wary of removing packages which are logged as being no longer required (orphans). Certainly there's not 5GB's worth of the things. If this had been Windows, Tree Size Pro would have given me some idea where this stuff was hiding.

[benmc]

have a look here (maybe): viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11607

[doktor5000]

If this had been Windows, Tree Size Pro would have given me some idea where this stuff was hiding.

And as we are on linux, you can either use du or ncdu or any of the various other alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/tree ... form=linux

[wintpe]

Rod
the default install of mga kde, is in my personal opinion full of unnecessary bloat and the first thing i do is remove loads of it.

its to much agro to deselect at install time, and much simpler to have a cleanup script that you run post install.

probably those that maintain the default list have a good reason or its based on good feedback, on desired default

but for me ekida softphone, amorak, mplayer, dragon player, all the KDE based little apps, kmail for example to name just a few are the first things that i remove.

If i was cutting my own custom version it would indeed only include minimal kde, then people could add what they want.

maybe if this is what many would like it might be something to be voted on for mga7.

regards peter

[doktor5000]

To be fair, the default KDE install is for the regular user.
If you know what you want, why not doing it the other way around - a minimal network install and then only install the packages you actually want/need?
You can't really have both, you can either have a minimalistic install, or a full-blown default installation. But the Mageia installer still allows you to select either of those options, so that's not something to be changed about the install.

But this is offtopic, it's probably better to first get an understanding what takes up the most space and then see whether those are packaged files or if that's some variable data like logs, cache or something the like.

[rodgoslin]

Sorry about the delay in getting back to this topic. I feel a bit like BA, Jugggling several disasters at the same time. Thank you, Doktor, ncdu -x / did the trick, in isolating the heaviest areas, /usr and /var. On the basis of considering that there'd not be too much I could do with /usr. I looked at /var. There wasn't much I could do there either. I got rid of some old kernel files and deleted the archives from /var/logs. The main culprit seems to be a large file in a mysql directory, of about 1.5GB. I wasn't sure what it's importance was, so left it. I finally freed up enough space by deleting unused applications. Alas, it didn't work. I had enough disk space but mga5 upgrade to mga6 didn't work. The install had a lot of problems with incompatibility with mga5, or absence of required files. To give mga6 the benefit, it certainly tried. It went round in ever decreasing circles of trying to install the un-installable, until it went into infinite circles, over installing 3 applications of Aconadi, which I never use anyway I was rather surprised to find that it would actually boot. It had, however a number of issues, so I started again and did a full install, which went fine, apart from a couple of glitches. This was in the way of a tryout, the machine, an old Thinkpad T400, didn't have any significant data. I think I'm going to like Mga6, once I've got it setup the way I like it. Thanks all, for the help and comments. I'll close the thread in a day or two.