Finally using 5.5! User tip plus small miracle!
Hello,
I recently undertook the Herculean task of backing up my /home to about 10 DVD's in preparation to move to Trisquel 5.5 from 4.5. Why, you ask? I could not upgrade the normal way because the too small root partition which started out at about 9GB (as it does even in the new installer) became full and there was no way for me to resize the XFS partition. Had I not caught this, the new 5.5 installer would have condemned me to the same fate in the future. I set up custom partitions on my 320GB drive and made 2GB swap, 120 GB XFS for the /home, and the rest for /.
After all is said and done I am very glad I upgraded, for one main reason: MY USB PORTS WORK NOW!!! Previously when I connected remove-able media like flash drives, NOTHING would happen, except once every blue moon, which was frustrating. I am not sure why this happened, because for some things, like reflashing my Ben Nanonote, the USB seemed to work fine and reliably. Whatever the cause, it is fixed now! I feel like I have a whole new computer!
I have a tip for those of you who, like me, do not want to see icons on the Desktop.Previously one could use gconf-editor, but now it is easier, just click the menu and go to System Settings > Advanced Settings (under the Personal section). Click on the Desktop entry in the left pane selector, and on the right, you can toggle which elements are shown on the Desktop. I have Computer icon visible on Desktop, Home icon visible on Desktop, and Trash icon visible on Desktop set to OFF, but show mounted volumes on the Desktop set to on, just so I know at a glance what is mounted and what is not.
Thank you for a great 5.5 release and I am so glad to have my USB working! Happy Hacking!
Glad you made it!
9 gigs sounds like a lot to me. I currently have a 9 gig / and 6 gigs of it is still free. Did you find out what used so much space?
You made a 198 GB root partition?! This is far to much. 16 GB should already be more than necessary. You will soon run out of space on the home partition. On the contrary, I do not even think that you can fill a 198 GB root partition. Installing everything in Trisquel's repository may not even take that much space.
To fix that, you can reinstall Trisquel and you do not need to backup (or transfer the data from your DVDs) again. An XFS cannot be shrunk but it can be extended. That is why you can remove the root partition from the Live system and extend the home partition (running 'gparted'). Then you can proceed to the reinstall choosing a custom partitioning with the correct home partition but without reformating it (a case to check). The root partition would be created in the remaining free space. You can either create this partition from GParted or from the installer.
I am a translator!
If you will be installing games that have native GNU/Linux support, they will go onto the / partition by default. If you intend on doing that, there might be a reason to keep it relatively big, yet I'd still resize it if I were you. 30GB ought to be more than enough EVEN if you put a lot of games on there. You can barely fill 10GB on / with normal software. And you would need to install most of everything in the repository to do that...
I always partition my drive for 10GB on / and let the rest be /home. Never ran into any issues with space on /, even after installing different DEs at once.
actually I have a 166 GB / and 129 GB /home. I do not think I will soon fill up either, and I just wanted to make extra sure I did not fill the / again. I do not remember what filled the space, but I suspect it was the programs installed considering I put all downloads, etc., on the /home. As I recall I DID have a lot installed, especially in the way of media processing applications like Rosegarden, video editors, etc.
If I resize my / to say, 32GB, will it be straightforward to add the unallocated free space to the /home, or do I have to destroy and re-create partitions?
In theory, an XFS file system can be enlarged without losing any data. However, GParted will certainly advise you to backup your data first. So, I guess things might go wrong. I have never seen such a problem though. Anyway, I guess you do not have many new data since you backed up them on DVDs.
Extending a partition with GParted is very easy. You just need to remove an adjacent partition and move a cursor. The space being gained from the root partition, this is the one to remove. If there is another partition in between, you either have to remove it as well (if it is a swap partition, for instance, there is no problem in removing it) or move it at the end of the free space you gained from the root partition.
Then, you can recreate the deleted partitions either from GParted or relying on the installer. Anyway, you will have to choose the custom partitioning during the install so that you can specify the home partition and uncheck the box specifying whether it should be formatted. Do not forget to uncheck this box!
An application you want to know about is the Baobab disk analyzer. Trisquel installs it by default (you can find it in the menu or launch by typing 'baobab' in the Alt+F2 prompt or in a terminal). It is very convenient to visually find out what takes space. For instance, have you cleaned the APT archives (e.g., by executing 'sudo apt-get clean')? After months of use, these archives take GB of space. Same thing about the old kernels, which are not removed by default (you can search "linux-" in the Synaptic package manager and remove all packages with version numbers below the one you use). Again, you can free quite some space in this way: an image of the kernel takes about 150 MB + 100 MB if you have its headers installed.
You can find useful partitioning considerations here: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/full-disk-encryption-multiple-partitions