Hello all,

I'm trying to clean my harddrive with the apt-get clean command but to no avail. What am I doing wrong? Do I have to be in a particular directory?

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fernando@fernando-laptop:~$ apt-get clean
E: Could not open lock file /var/cache/apt/archives/lock - open (13 Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the download directory
fernando@fernando-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get clean
[sudo] password for fernando:
fernando@fernando-laptop:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 2.3G 2.2G 0 100% /
tmpfs 1003M 0 1003M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1003M 100K 1003M 1% /var/run
varlock 1003M 0 1003M 0% /var/lock
udev 1003M 164K 1003M 1% /dev
tmpfs 1003M 544K 1002M 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1003M 2.4M 1000M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/volatile
overflow 1.0M 340K 684K 34% /tmp
/dev/sdb1 233G 41G 193G 18% /media/My Passport
___________________________

thanks for you help in advance!

You need to look in your / directory to see if there are files you don't need.
only cleans files in /var/cache/apt/archives/

You probably have some old kernels hanging around

apt-get won't work with standard user permissions. Try this: If you are in the sudoers table, you will be prompted for your password, then the command will work. If you aren't in the sudoers table, try and enter the root password.

@bartonski
from the original post

my debian lenny on router takes around 400M on total 1.8G HDD(it's OLD) and most of this space is also taken by utils i don't use but don't remove(who knows when they may become useful?).
look at /usr directory. see if you don't need some programs, uninstall them with apt. or do it manually(not recommended).
--
upd: i also use ncdu for cleaning purposes(it shows a disk usage). it's actual name is "ncurses disk usage". i like that util.

Repo - What files should I look to clean? I don't want to get rid of anything necessary.

Web3 - Same question. Is anything in /usr necessary? Or can I delete it all?

You can look in /var/log for the backup logs created by logrotate
You can remove old kernels using synaptic
Don't delete files in /usr, unless you know what you are doing
As suggested by web31377 use ncdu to find large files and directories

When I try to remove some log files (sudo rm), the systems says that the files do not exist, despite the fact that they are displayed on my screen.

The system tells me that there is not enough space to create the .synaptic directory and therefore cannot run the program. I've deleted a few files but there still isn't enough space.

I ran the program but I haven't been able to delete anything. Open Office has had internal errors since I got Ubuntu so I deleted it (700+ MBs), and when I ran ncdu again, it was fully restored.

Once again, I really appreciate your help with this matter! It's nice to more help than frustration

Since you have no seperate /home partition, perhaps you can delete some stuff in your home directory,
or move them to /media/My Passport
In firefox you can delete the cache.
Take a look if your trashfolder is empty.
Do you use beagle or another software to search the drive?
They can create big files.

make sure to use the correct name, and if needed the correct path. You can copy/paste in the terminal

Note to self: read, then post.