Low disk space - how to clean out garbage?

Hardware Librem 5
38

Interesting!

39

If only it wasn’t so bloody hard to manipulate files in protected folders! Nemo does not allow copying files in these directories. Running nemo from the command line as root (sudo nemo) does not work. And I don’t know of an elegant way to do this from the comand line.
(I want to copy the three files needed to a new directory, and then delete the old flathub directory.)

40

I think I managed to do it.
I copied the ‘active’ directory, the giant (hex?) number without a dot, and the most recent giant (hex) number with a dot to a new /flathub/aarch64 directory. After renaming the original flathub dir.
So, now I can delete the original flathub dir?

Or maybe I don’t need the one with the dot(?)

41

Correct, you don’t need the one with the dot.
But ‘active’ isn’t a directory, it’s a link pointing to the non-dot prefixed dir (I had only one).
My folder currently contains:

9189a0c9b3c5495ad643b79bdd1b941df088ab3edc629172d4210b33d02c405a
active -> 9189a0c9b3c5495ad643b79bdd1b941df088ab3edc629172d4210b33d02c405a
.timestamp

It works … but I don’t take any responsibilities :slight_smile:

42

Okay. Thanks.
No complaints yet about the new leaner one. I’ll wait a bit before I delete anything.

43

Where exaclty is Flatpak in the /home directory?
And where is that generaljournal cache at?

44

I think he means

~/.local/share/flatpak

Try

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=10d

it’s been explained above, on this thread

1 Like
45

Ah, okay. Thanks.
Just checking whether it was the same journal cleaning instruction I had seen before, or another one. It’s the same.

And the cache in the flatpak dir is empty.

46

Hello:

To follow up on this:

  1. Can somebody please help us poor souls who have Librem 5 and want to install Flatpaks without unecessary bloat? I realize Purism has other things to do, but this is a silly issue.

  2. Doing things on my own, again, I took a whim and used this command:

rm -r /var/lib/flatpak/appstream/flathub/aarch64

That deleted the whole directory and files in it. I got rid of about 2 GB of what appear to be unnecessary bloat.

Warning, I am a novice and I guarantee nothing! Run that command at your own risk.

I hope that helps someone. There have been no adverse effects on my us of Flatpak apps on the phone - yet.

47

I just reflash the latest Evergreen LUKS and DAS U-Boot images to deal with bloat or misconfigurations. Far more often I do it due to the latter than the former, since I hardly install anything to begin with.

48

Ok. Thank you. Can you make it easy on me and tell me how to easily do that?

1 Like
49

The following official documentation may get you pointed in the right direction: https://docs.puri.sm/Librem_5/Troubleshooting/Reflashing.html

3 Likes
50

Here is a high-level overview:

  1. Download, verify, and install the PureOS 10.3 image on a USB drive using disk-writing software such as balenaEtcher.

  2. Boot into the PureOS USB live image.

  3. Follow the instructions listed by Irvine Wade above this post, or alternatively this one below.

3 Likes
51

See flatsweep (use on own risk).

4 Likes
52

You just saved me 1.6 GB of space. Merci beaucoup!

2 Likes
53

I took the risk and did:
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/flatpak/appstream
This resulted in 4.3GB of extra storage. I did not notice any negative side effects, but use at own risk.
The growing /var/lib/flatpak/appstream is a bug that is fixed in a newer flatpak release.

1 Like
54

Doing a sudo rm -r .* in var/lib/flatpak/appstream/flathub/aarch64 works too, and it is somewhat less drastic.

6 Likes
55

Well done! Bought me three to four times more than vacuum.

2 Likes
56

I have just found out that, to clean up unused files and prevent Flatpak’s footprint from filling up all available space, I need to run regularly something along the following lines.

$ flatpak update
$ flatpak remove --unused --delete-data
$ rm -r ~/.local/share/flatpak/appstream/*
$ sudo rm -r /var/lib/flatpak/appstream/*
$ sudo flatpak repair
$ flatpak --user repair

As far as I understand, It is necessary to delete the contents of appstream directories mannually due to a bug in the Byzantium version of Flatpak, which was fixed upstream. So, it is hopefully not required on Crimson.

Running “repair” is necessary to prune unused binaries in the objects store. I assume that Flatpak has a legitimate reason to keep those files. So, “repair” needs to be run regularly to remove them. But are the relatively unsophisticated users of Librem 5 supposed to know about that? Shouldn’t the PureOS distribution take out the trash for them? What am I missing?

57

Probably, yes, but it doesn’t as such know what flatpak even does - so perhaps installing flatpak should provide that automatic cleanup.