Hi All;

I can't figure this out.

I have a laptop with a 180 gig drive running Ubuntu 8.10. This morning I discovered that I was running very low on disk space. I was very surprised since it's a fairly new installation.

I cleared out some obvious stuff - big downloads, emptied the trash, cleared out /tmp/*, ran apt-get clean and autoclean, etc. That helped enough so I could at least boot with some headroom.

But .... I have not been able to figure out what's using all the space. I have Sun VirtualBox running an XP VM that's about 8 gig. The .VDI folder is another 8g, and various stuff uses up 200-300 meg here and there. The problem is that I cannot get any of the numbers I can find to add up to anywhere near the 146 gig that is supposedly in use

Here's the output for df-h:
If anyone has suggestions about finding the items using lots of space, I'd appreciate any and all of them.

Thanks!

0 /cdrom
0 /initrd.img
0 /initrd.img.old
0 /proc
0 /sys
0 /vmlinuz
0 /vmlinuz.old
1 /lost+found
1 /media
1 /mnt
1 /opt
1 /srv
1 /tmp
3 /dev
7 /bin
9 /sbin
14 /etc
24 /boot
220 /lib
306 /var
2175 /usr
8784 /home
137250 /root

OK,, that's better

0 /cdrom
0 /initrd.img
0 /initrd.img.old
0 /proc
0 /sys
0 /vmlinuz
0 /vmlinuz.old
1 /lost+found
1 /media
1 /mnt
1 /opt
1 /srv
1 /tmp
3 /dev
7 /bin
9 /root
9 /sbin
14 /etc
24 /boot
220 /lib
306 /var
2175 /usr
8785 /home

and

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 178G 12G 158G 7% /
tmpfs 1012M 0 1012M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1012M 112K 1012M 1% /var/run
varlock 1012M 0 1012M 0% /var/lock
udev 1012M 2.9M 1009M 1% /dev
tmpfs 1012M 12K 1012M 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1012M 2.0M 1010M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-9-generic/volatile
/dev/mmcblk0p1 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /media/MICRO2G_01


That's more like what I expected. (Thanks!)

However, it looks like /root/.local/share/Trash/files contained every file I ever sent to the trash. What's up with that? If I empty the trash, I expect the files are completely gone.

Any thoughts on these results?

Sorry mate, can't answer that - I don't use Gnome. But that said: you
shouldn't be running gnome as root in the first place ;}

That's just it - I *don't* run as root. Which is why I'm surprised to see that all there. I use sudo when needed, otherwise I run in regular user account.

Do you perhaps have a samba share and are logging in as root for that?

No - this machine is used as a secondary machine at work so I don't have to use Windows more than necessary. I use it for remote access to Windows servers via a VNC client (RAdmin running under Wine) and I have VirtualBox running XP on occasion. Other than that It's used for researching support questions on the net for my customers - Firefox. Samba is not installed and I don't connect to any Windows shares.

Not sure but it MAY be that you have deleted some files using sudo and so it put those files in the root .trash rather than the user .trash. An easy way to check is to just look in /root/.trash (or similiar) and see what is there. If that is the problem the easiest way is just to log in as root and empty your trash. While there probably is a way to do it without logging in as root I have no idea what it would be.

The next thing I'd do, I guess, is to look at the files that are in the trashcan. What are they? Where did they come from? What was I doing when I deleted them? Did I delete them, or am I compromised?