updates

Hi,
Sorry about the confusion. I am new to all this command stuff. I do not know how to open a terminal.
Please advise me how to find a terminal and then I can get you the information requested. Thanks for putting up with me and my lack of unbuntu knowledge. I Never new it could be so difficult using unbuntu,
but I am having fun learning. Thanks again Gary

It's perfectly OK. Most activities in Ubuntu can be accomplished
without a terminal; however, for various reasons it is often easier to
quickly troubleshoot and solve problems in a terminal. I gave
directions for opening a terminal in another question you asked and I am
going to copy and paste a portion of them here for completeness:

The commands that I mentioned should be run in a terminal which can be
reached by going to the Applications menu in the upper left-hand corner
of the screen, then going to the Accessories menu and starting the
Terminal application. (This is what I mean in step two of my directions
when I said Applications->Accessories->Terminal).
...
More information on using the terminal can be found here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal

I hope this has helped.

Hi,
The command
df

sudo fdisk-l

did not work. we did this to find out about the drive space. Thanks Gary

df and sudo fdisk -l are two different commands. Please do the following:

1) Open the terminal:
2) Type or copy and paste: df
3) Press Enter
4) Copy all output of that command back here

5) Type or copy and paste: sudo fdisk -l
6) Press Enter
7) Type your password when prompted and type enter.
8) Copy all output of that command back here.

Even if the commands give errors, that might be helpful too, so be sure to post those.

Hi,
Did you get the info on my disc drive? Gary

Gary,
You have to paste the text from the terminal into your next post here. Please note it's Ctrl+Shift+c to copy from the terminal. You can also get Copy from the Edit menu in the terminal.

Kind regards,
Jon

gary@gary:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 3640944 2784324 673080 81% /
varrun 252564 100 252464 1% /var/run
varlock 252564 0 252564 0% /var/lock
udev 252564 44 252520 1% /dev
devshm 252564 24 252540 1% /dev/shm
lrm 252564 1852 250712 1% /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-lpia/volatile
gvfs-fuse-daemon 3640944 2784324 673080 81% /home/gary/.gvfs
gary@gary:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for gary:

Disk /dev/sda: 3791 MB, 3791241216 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 460 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 3 24066 de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 * 4 460 3670852+ 83 Linux
gary@gary:~$

Hope this helps. Thanks Gary

Hi Gary,
If you've been doing a lot of updating, you might find you've got a lot of archives of packages that you've installed or updated.

in the terminal, try the following:

df

[which will tell you how much space left you have, as you know, the percentage is easiest to read I guess]

then do:

sudo apt-get clean

[apt-get is the package managing thing that Synaptic uses behind the scenes and clean is the apt-get tool that removes all the old archive package files. As you need root user privileges to run apt-get, you must sudo (super-user-do) it]

and then

df

again to see how much that's helped.

Hopefully if you've reclaimed loads of disk space you can go back to the update manager to continue as you were.

Kind regards,
Jon

Unfortunately, you computer is below the minimum requirements for running Ubuntu desktop. As you can see here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements

The minimum requirement is 4GB hard drive and your drive is just under 4GB. As can be seen from that command output, your drive is already 81% full. So in fact your drive actually IS filling up when you try to download the updates. There are some ways to free up disk space; however, I am unsure whether you will be able to free up enough.

Try running the following commands

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoclean

Then run the df command again and paste the output here just like you just did.

gary@gary:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 3640944 2767008 690396 81% /
varrun 252564 100 252464 1% /var/run
varlock 252564 0 252564 0% /var/lock
udev 252564 44 252520 1% /dev
devshm 252564 24 252540 1% /dev/shm
lrm 252564 1852 250712 1% /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-lpia/volatile
gvfs-fuse-daemon 3640944 2767008 690396 81% /home/gary/.gvfs
gary@gary:~$

Hi, I ran the clean up commands and here is the df info. Are there other unbunto software that will run on a system wit lower disc space? What are my options at this point? what if I order more disc drive.Thanks Gary

Hi Gary,
Yes! Try Xubuntu.

http://www.xubuntu.org/get

Kind regards,
Jon

Thanks Steven Danna, that solved my question.