Lack of space in Raspberry Pi with 4GB SD Card
 

I am in the process of using the Raspberry Pi.

I attempted to install gnome. The response was that there was insufficient space. I would like to recover and tried:pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get remove gnome
E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo dpkg --configure -a
dpkg: error: failed to write status database record about 'libexttextcat-data' to '/var/lib/dpkg/status': No space left on device
pi@raspberrypi ~ $

Clearly this was not the thing to do.

Two questions:

1. How do I find the free space?
2. How do I recover from this snafu?

I would appreciate advice.

Colin W.

Take a look in /tmp and see if dpkg left any temporary files lying around. If so, these are good candidates for clean up before running dpkg again.

Thanks for the suggestion. It would appear that tmp holds 4 bytes.

It seems that I need much more space than that.

Colin W.

Maybe look in /var/tmp then? I am not sure where all dpkg stashes temporary downloaded files, but you will want to clean these up. You can do.

To see which directories are using a lot of space. You can work your way down from there. I'd suggest looking through /var as it contains a lot of log and temporary files. However, be sure that a file is not needed before deleting it!

Might also look in /var/log for some older log files you can delete.

Gnome might be a little too much for the power of the RaspberryPi. If you are using Debian LXDE is what comes by default, If you havent done you can resize the partition in RaspberryPi by typing on terminal
Then select the option EXPAND-ROOTFS That will make the OS to fill up the SD card in the Pi, if you have unuse space.
I think the downloaded image file is about two GB.

Good luck to you.

Inappropriate installation of gnome in a machine with limited disk storage
 

Thanks for moving this to a more appropriate thread.

I am now trying to remove gnome, so that the machine becomes serviceable again.

Colin W.