Ubuntu says i am out of space but i actually have alot left

Could you post the output of the terminal command below:

df -h

?

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb6 2.3G 2.3G 0 100% /
tmpfs 343M 0 343M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 343M 92K 343M 1% /var/run
varlock 343M 0 343M 0% /var/lock
udev 343M 180K 343M 1% /dev
tmpfs 343M 176K 343M 1% /dev/shm
lrm 343M 2.4M 341M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/volatile
overflow 1.0M 16K 1008K 2% /tmp
/dev/sdb2 135G 7.8G 121G 7% /media/disk
/dev/sdb1 157G 152G 5.1G 97% /media/My Book
b@brian-desktop:~$

"/dev/sdb6 2.3G 2.3G 0 100% /"

You are actually out of space on your root partition.

Where are you trying to save it?

i got it saved now thanks
but i have one more question

<a href="http://tinypic.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i43.tinypic.com/ve2ccp.png" border="0" alt="Image and video hosting by TinyPic"></a>

how to i get past this so i can install my application?

thank you

is there any way i can free space or make my partition larger without reinstalling ubuntu?

As far as I know, you cannot run several package managers at the same time, you cannot and you need not: they all allow you to install the same software from the same sources. Make sure that all other package managers (e.g. Synaptic, apt-get, aptitude) are closed before you try to install the package installer as in your screen shot.

To free space you can remove documents, uninstall unnecessary programmes, and, in the terminal, run:
 * sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
 * sudo apt-get clean
this will remove and purge automatically installed but no longer needed programmes and empty the package cache, respectively.

To resize a partition you need to unmount that partition, hence you need to use a live CD to resize the root partition; run Gparted from this live CD to resize your partitions. As there is always a small risk of losing data, I would advise you to make a backup of important data first.

thank you I will give that a try today

Hi. I came accross something weird that has I beleive to do with the question (or at least I didn't find anyone that had something closer. I'll try to be precise :-)
My setup:
- laptop, 1gig, normal suite of add-ons... bluetooth, wireless, hsdpa... . Has only Ubuntu on it originally 8 upgraded to 9 and regularly updated.
- I have set Virtual box some days ago (sort of wanting to have a glimpse on Windows, here and then, let's say a ... souvenir). 10 gig given

A few days ago i got the blast mesage : Out of Space. Checked my filesystem, cleaned the baks and few other unnecessary files, got rid of broken packages (very little), orphan dumped (little too) and ... still "Out of Space".

It always starts when I run Upgrade or Synaptics.

I read a few threads here and there and did my home work (Gtk Orphan, Bonager, and a clean up of my menus - found 30 and more).

Beside the Out of Space problem, my desktop menu went berserk ... killed the Application drop down, lost all items... something really nasty.... so.... I started to get rid of Compiz (never know!), brought the interface back to very simple, no gimmicks, deleted whatever "menu" file was left and regenerated with the buggy "alacarte".

Now I'm still sitting in front of the PC and do not want to "reboot", 'cause I feel I'm not out of trouble.

Meanwhile I also had strange behaviors from Firefox, which I guess was this "no space" problem.
I forgot... I killed my Virtual Box, and got back the 10 gigs that are now 9 !!!

Has anyone a clue ? Mny thanks.

 I forgot... the sum of my filesystem is 30gigs, so I am looking on where have the 11gigs gone, considering the free 9.

if your laptop is 1 gig i reccomend having atleast 6 gigs of space.
anything under 5 or so ubuntu will not run properly

@good_apollo
Sound advice but it seems that the issue is elsewhere. I managed as stated to get it back to 11/12 gigs, got rid of the embedded windows xp in virtual box. Now 2 days latter it is "down" to 8 gigs, and no new "backups".
I checked all the indexing (Google desktop and tracker) and mail mirroring (Gmail) but amount is reasonable and doesn't increase. I am still "fresh" on linux and need to understand more, I guess that I have to screen every directory and process, looks more like a "fat" issue or something to do with reporting free space. I'll get back for sure when I have spotted what is eating my hd. One thing for sure: some add-ons in Firefox increase its need of space and do a lot of "cached". But there again for the time being I have cleaned and reinstalled the browser and am putting add-ons one by one again to check when something gets wrong. Mny tks.

@montevjl: Have you run "Disk Usage Analyzer" (baobab) to determine what directories are taking the most space?

I did. The Home and User directories were naturally the "large" ones. I made sure to clean everything not necessary (even more... :-)). I had to really clean out Compiz because of strange behavior as stated and double-check that no backup or SQL's were generated. Meanwhile I performed last available updates (now I have vers. 9.04, 2.6.28.13 generic) and it seems that nothing is "inflating" the volume.
Everything is back to normal or... now file manager says that the volume is of unknown type (as well as for any other volume, CD/DVD, memstick. It shows 8.9 gigs free while baobab says 11.6 ! The setup runs fine and no process is taking place (good ol' watchin' hd led!).
I guess I have to wait until it starts "eating" space again! And this discrepancy between filemanager and diskanalyser... Do you know the best way to track filesystem's activity? Tks.

I think the file manager measures how much space there is left for you to write to, whereas the disc analyser measures how much is actually being used. However, some part of the free space is reserved for root: it is free space, but normal users cannot write to it. This means there is always more free space on any partition than you – a normal user – can write to. The idea is that if the partition is full, root still has some free space left to solve the problem – might come in useful if something starts eating space again ;-).

As for tracking the file system’s activity: the System Monitor applet can give you up-to-date info, but may be impractical; you could also try iotop (command-line programme), it gives the disc usage per process.

How did you check the free space in the file manager? By looking at "Filesystem Properties"? Remember that the filesystem is a conglomeration of all the space on your system, including harddisks, removable media, even virtual space. Nautilus (the file manager) and baobab may very well count it differently.

Actually, looking at my numbers, Nautilus seems to just count the free space on your root partition. This will not include swap, any Windows partitions, or any other secondary partitions you may have made. Disk Usage Analyzer, on the other hand, seems to count all mounted partitions.

Counting free space on Linux (or any UNIX-like system) is a little hard because the concept of "drives" is abstracted. Probably the Partition Editor is the best place to look to see how much space you have since it is the program that exposes the physical drives.

Well... it took sometimes to find where the "missing" space was. It just
happened that I was cleaning space and I found in a hidden directory (not
taken into account by Nautilus) some huge files that were marked "trash" in
the extension and quite huge (several hundred mb!). I canceled them all and
retrieved... 20 and more gigs! Now... how did this happen, and why didn't
they come up earlier using the different tools to clean garbage, dead stuff
and the rest, I have no clue!
So, for now I don't have a solution, just say that if anyone comes accross
this problem, he has to look for files in the trash folders. Thanks to
everyone.
/jl

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 02:25, David Tombs <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Question #71202 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/71202
>
> David Tombs posted a new comment:
> How did you check the free space in the file manager? By looking at
> "Filesystem Properties"? Remember that the filesystem is a
> conglomeration of all the space on your system, including harddisks,
> removable media, even virtual space. Nautilus (the file manager) and
> baobab may very well count it differently.
>
> Actually, looking at my numbers, Nautilus seems to just count the free
> space on your root partition. This will not include swap, any Windows
> partitions, or any other secondary partitions you may have made. Disk
> Usage Analyzer, on the other hand, seems to count all mounted
> partitions.
>
> Counting free space on Linux (or any UNIX-like system) is a little hard
> because the concept of "drives" is abstracted. Probably the Partition
> Editor is the best place to look to see how much space you have since it
> is the program that exposes the physical drives.
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> subscriber of the question.
>

What directory were the files in? ~/.Trash?

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 9:39 AM,
montevjl<email address hidden> wrote:
> Question #71202 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/71202
>
> montevjl posted a new comment:
> Well... it took sometimes to find where the "missing" space was. It just
> happened that I was cleaning space and I found in a hidden directory (not
> taken into account by Nautilus) some huge files that were marked "trash" in
> the extension and quite huge (several hundred mb!). I canceled them all and
> retrieved... 20 and more gigs! Now... how did this happen, and why didn't
> they come up earlier using the different tools to clean garbage, dead stuff
> and the rest, I have no clue!
> So, for now I don't have a solution, just say that if anyone comes accross
> this problem, he has to look for files in the trash folders. Thanks to
> everyone.
> /jl
>
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 02:25, David Tombs <
> <email address hidden>> wrote:
>
>> Question #71202 on Ubuntu changed:
>> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/71202
>>
>> David Tombs posted a new comment:
>> How did you check the free space in the file manager? By looking at
>> "Filesystem Properties"? Remember that the filesystem is a
>> conglomeration of all the space on your system, including harddisks,
>> removable media, even virtual space. Nautilus (the file manager) and
>> baobab may very well count it differently.
>>
>> Actually, looking at my numbers, Nautilus seems to just count the free
>> space on your root partition. This will not include swap, any Windows
>> partitions, or any other secondary partitions you may have made. Disk
>> Usage Analyzer, on the other hand, seems to count all mounted
>> partitions.
>>
>> Counting free space on Linux (or any UNIX-like system) is a little hard
>> because the concept of "drives" is abstracted. Probably the Partition
>> Editor is the best place to look to see how much space you have since it
>> is the program that exposes the physical drives.
>>
>> --
>> You received this question notification because you are a direct
>> subscriber of the question.
>>
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> subscriber of the question.
>

--
Wise men _still_ seek Him.

hum... yes. But I have to double check on the pc where it happened. One
thing for sure is that the directory was somehow hidden.

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 15:45, David Tombs <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Question #71202 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/71202
>
> David Tombs posted a new comment:
> What directory were the files in? ~/.Trash?
>
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 9:39 AM,
> montevjl<email address hidden> wrote:
> > Question #71202 on Ubuntu changed:
> > https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/71202
> >
> > montevjl posted a new comment:
> > Well... it took sometimes to find where the "missing" space was. It just
> > happened that I was cleaning space and I found in a hidden directory (not
> > taken into account by Nautilus) some huge files that were marked "trash"
> in
> > the extension and quite huge (several hundred mb!). I canceled them all
> and
> > retrieved... 20 and more gigs! Now... how did this happen, and why didn't
> > they come up earlier using the different tools to clean garbage, dead
> stuff
> > and the rest, I have no clue!
> > So, for now I don't have a solution, just say that if anyone comes
> accross
> > this problem, he has to look for files in the trash folders. Thanks to
> > everyone.
> > /jl
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 02:25, David Tombs <
> > <email address hidden>> wrote:
> >
> >> Question #71202 on Ubuntu changed:
> >> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/71202
> >>
> >> David Tombs posted a new comment:
> >> How did you check the free space in the file manager? By looking at
> >> "Filesystem Properties"? Remember that the filesystem is a
> >> conglomeration of all the space on your system, including harddisks,
> >> removable media, even virtual space. Nautilus (the file manager) and
> >> baobab may very well count it differently.
> >>
> >> Actually, looking at my numbers, Nautilus seems to just count the free
> >> space on your root partition. This will not include swap, any Windows
> >> partitions, or any other secondary partitions you may have made. Disk
> >> Usage Analyzer, on the other hand, seems to count all mounted
> >> partitions.
> >>
> >> Counting free space on Linux (or any UNIX-like system) is a little hard
> >> because the concept of "drives" is abstracted. Probably the Partition
> >> Editor is the best place to look to see how much space you have since it
> >> is the program that exposes the physical drives.
> >>
> >> --
> >> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> >> subscriber of the question.
> >>
> >
> > --
> > You received this question notification because you are a direct
> > subscriber of the question.
> >
>
>
> --
> Wise men _still_ seek Him.
>
> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> subscriber of the question.
>

~/.Trash was and ~/.local/share/Trash is your Deleted Items Folder: emptying this should clean out all the files in this directory...

Now I come to think of it... the location of the Deleted Items Folder has been changed recently. Maybe you had some left-over files in ~/.Trash, but the Deleted Items Folder was already moved to ~/.local/share/Trash – so emptying the Deleted Items Folder would no longer remove files from the old location. I am pretty sure you can delete ~/.Trash altogether.