Running out of memory already

Hardware Librem 5
1

After having used my L5 for just under two months it is beginning to run out of ‘disk’ space already.
I haven’t installed all that many apps just yet - mostly because there arn’t all that many - but already the 32 Gb internal memory is at nearly two-thirds of its capacity.

So, soon I - and I would guess others too - will be running out of disk space.

My question therefore, is what to do about this?
Are there ways to clean up the memory? Either by app or manually. Are there apps or commands that can weed out any dross? Is there any lingering obsolete stuff I can simply delete?

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

2

For starters, check the output of df -h /. If you used your L5 for just under two months, you may have hit a bug we had recently where the flashed images weren’t properly resized to fill the whole eMMC at first boot.

3

That results in Size: 29G, Used: 18G, Free: 9.2G.
Seems alright, doesn’t it?

4

Now, try ncdu to see what uses your disk.

5

that replies ‘command not found’

but i installed it

6

After installing:
sudo apt install ncdu,
it should work.

7

I did install it. but it is not ver informative. not really suited for such a small screen.

8

It works well enough in horizontal mode for me. You can also try the Usage app (Storage tab)

9

An alternative to the Usage app is GNOME System Monitor, which can show a lot more detail: My demo here.

P.S. I just freed up half a gig by moving my pictures to the µSD card.

10

ncdu gives only partial info
usage hangs on ‘scanning directories’

11

Also maybe don’t worry about it since you have 9GB remaining. I would start worrying about it if say 1GB is remaining.

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12

Try this:

flatpak uninstall --unused

Which will remove any flatpak files not currently in use. I also found this in a Linux Mint forum:

sudo rm -rf /var/tmp/flatpak-cache-*
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/flatpak/.removed/

Which also freed up a bunch of space on my L5.

3 Likes
13

true. still some space left. and not a lot of stuff to install.

14

Ah! Good one. I’ll give it a try.

15

Clearing Firefox’s cache netted me 111 MB. (Not much, I know.)

16

Does this also uninstall installed flatpaks if you simply haven’t used them in a while? Or just remnants of already uninstalled flatpaks?

17

Also doing this once and a while will prune the size of the journal:

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=7d

If you haven’t done this yet I bet you’ll get a bunch more space back as well but that isn’t automatic. I also went and configured my journal file to not exceed 500 meg and 30 days.

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18

Those tmp flatpak files are huge.

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19

Should just write a script that does all this stuff and make it a cron job…lol.

2 Likes
20

I despise flatpaks for their size.

5 Likes