Figure 1: Attribution: Mageia 5 Installer Documentation – Partitioning with DrakX (http://doc.mageia.org/installer/5/en/content/doPartitionDisks.html)
It’s been a hairy few weeks. Looking at my WordPress folder on my laptop I see my last post was back in the middle of March! I could enumerate a nice long list for you of why I’ve been away but I’m sure you don’t care. Suffice it to say, I’ve busy at work and sick. However, I’m glad I’m back to documenting my geeky adventures. 🙂
Sometimes you choose to take on a project in Linux. Sometimes a project is thrust upon you. This happened to me recently and led me down a winding garden path into the very innards of my Linux installation.
The Problem Appears
I was busy researching topics to blog about (really!) when my Mageia 5 system asked me to install some updates. The majority of these are security patches and the like so I don’t usually think much about doing the updates and just set them up to run in the background. This time, however, I ran into an error!
Transaction Check Error: installing package XXXX needs 15MB on the / filesystem Error Summary ------------- Disk Requirements: At least 15MB more space needed on the / filesystem.
This was perplexing and I had never run into something like this before. I decided to see how much space I had in the ‘/’ (root) partition, since that is where my applications reside. I brought up the command line and this was the result:
[bradfonseca@localhost ~]$ df -H / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 13G 12G 0.13G 99% /
Make More Space
How could my root partition be so full? I hunted around on the Internet and found an article recommending clearing out old kernel RPMs which helped a little and got my root partition down to 90% which allowed my updates to proceed without error. I was now wondering why I allowed my root partition to be so small when I have 1 TB hard drive on this machine. A bit more searching uncovered that “Mageia 4 and earlier used to assign up to 12 GB to the root partition, which could be confusing for some end users (as 12 GB can be quickly filled after you’ve installed some games or several desktop environments).” I originally installed Mageia 4 on this laptop and then upgraded to Mageia 5 when it became available. Thus, I was saddled with the size I have allocated for my root partition by the automatic behaviour of Mageia 4.
The Mageia Community Weighs In
At this point, I started researching repartitioning my hard drive to give my root partition more space. This is when I felt it might be time to consult with the broader Mageia community and find out what would make the most sense. I made a post on the “Basic Support” section of the Mageia forum. The Mageia Linux community, like the Open source software community in general, are a helpful lot and are always willing to answer questions. I got a lot of helpful advice out of that one post. First, one of the users (doktor5000) asked me to run a series of commands and post the output:
[root@localhost bradfonseca]# du -mx / | sort -rn | head -25 10116 / 7894 /usr 3941 /usr/share 2501 /usr/lib64 1748 /var 1488 /usr/share/texmf-dist 1200 /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts 880 /usr/lib 809 /var/log 801 /var/log/journal/61016a35edb84a18a686214f2132bb59 801 /var/log/journal 503 /var/cache 472 /var/cache/urpmi 472 /usr/bin 433 /var/cache/urpmi/rpms 409 /usr/lib64/libreoffice 403 /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/type1 374 /usr/share/doc 359 /opt 316 /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public 264 /usr/share/games 239 /var/lib 228 /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/vf 220 /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program 218 /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex [root@localhost bradfonseca]#
Consulting the man pages I was able to glean that the series of piped commands suggested by the poster did the following:
- check my disk usage associated with my Mageia 5 filesystem and display the file sizes in MB blocks. (du -mx)
- Take this output and sort it so the largest files show up first. (sort -rn)
- Then display the first 25 lines of this output. (head -25)
Okay, I’ve learned something already!
A second poster (jiml8) reassured me that I had plenty of space in my root partition but that I had a number of folders that were far too big:
Just FWIW, I run a very large Linux workstation, and I have 28G devoted to
/, and it is 66% full at the present time.From the output you provided, your journal is out of control. It is occupying way too much space. Take a look in
/var/log/journaland follow into the subdirectory(s) you find there looking for .journal files. You will probably find many old and large files that do you no good. Delete them.You might want to go into
/etc/systemdand edit journald.conf to limit the amount of space the journal is allowed to use on your system. On mine, SystemMaxUse is uncommented and set to 100M, while SystemMaxFileSize=10M and MaxFileSec=1month.To uncomment them, remove the # symbol that is in front of the line.
He also noticed other problem areas:
OP {Original Poster} also has a huge
/var/cache/It needs to be cleaned out. Looks like an update started, then failed, with lots of RPMs cached and not installed. OP might just want to go ahead and manually install those using urpmi.
Results
It then became a simple exercise of following the directions given to me and clearing out the various problem folders. The results were quite satisfying:
[root@localhost ~]# df -H Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on devtmpfs 4.2G 0 4.2G 0% /dev tmpfs 4.2G 56M 4.1G 2% /dev/shm tmpfs 4.2G 869k 4.2G 1% /run /dev/sda1 13G 9.4G 2.6G 79% / tmpfs 4.2G 0 4.2G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 4.2G 107k 4.2G 1% /tmp /dev/sda6 968G 107G 862G 11% /home tmpfs 828M 13k 828M 1% /run/user/500
and the list of my largest folders in my root partition looked a lot better:
[root@localhost ~]# du -mx / | sort -rn | head -25 8847 / 7894 /usr 3941 /usr/share 2501 /usr/lib64 1488 /usr/share/texmf-dist 1200 /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts 880 /usr/lib 479 /var 472 /usr/bin 409 /usr/lib64/libreoffice 403 /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/type1 374 /usr/share/doc 359 /opt 316 /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public 264 /usr/share/games 239 /var/lib 228 /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/vf 220 /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program 218 /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex 212 /usr/share/atom 209 /usr/share/foomatic/db/source 209 /usr/share/foomatic/db 209 /usr/share/foomatic 191 /usr/share/apps 190 /var/tmp
I’ve got my root partition down to 79% capacity which I hope will be good enough until I decide to do a complete re-install in the future. I’ve set some key values in /etc/systemd to limit the size my journal folder can be and how big each journal files is allowed to grow to. This should prevent the problem from occurring again.
The Extra Benefit
This little learning experience came out of needing to solve a problem as opposed to wanting to solve a problem. I was running out disk space and couldn’t update my system. In spite of the necessity, this was still an enjoyable experience. Excellent online resources for Linux and for specific Linux distributions make it much easier to find potential solutions to any problem you might run into. I learned a lot in the past couple weeks and I look forward to my next learning opportunity.
Useful Links
- Download Mageia 5 (Link)
- About Mageia 5 (Link)
- Mageia 5 Software Packages Update (Link)
- An article describing how to help clear space in the root partition: (“Linux /boot: Out of Disk Space While Installing Package kernel-2.6.32-131.2.1.el6.x86_64” – Link)
- Mageia 5 Release Notes – Automatic Partitioning (Link)
- Creating a new Mageia 5 install USB (Link)
- The Mageia Forums (Link)
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