[SOLVED] Savage Space Saving

business_kid · 10-20-2023, 11:49 AM

I needed to save space on an undersized / partition. I had had to move a (generous) swap file to /home. After backing up the full install, I

Deleted obsolete X fonts and video drivers.
Deleted /usr/doc/ (Saved 1.3G)
Deleted /usr/share/ (Saved 4.7G)
As I'm using XFCE, so I removed every kde package. (Saved 1.5G)

All estimates are approximate. I repeat, I have a full backup and this is an Arm box. Do any of you expect consequences from this surgery, and why? I have a vague nag in my head that some kde libs might actually be useful. . .

tadgy · 10-20-2023, 12:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

Deleted /usr/share/ (Saved 4.7G)

Deleting /usr/share was not very clever to be perfectly honest.

There is a lot of stuff placed in /usr/share that is required for the packages installed to operate correctly. One very simple example is /usr/share/terminfo or /usr/share/ca-certificates.

You are going to need your backup

henca · 10-20-2023, 12:08 PM

I would have been careful to remove /usr/share, maybe it contains some icons or sound files that you want in XFCE.

Myself I prefer to have a rather small / partition and keep /usr on its own partition. For you this might be a good time to creata an own partition for /usr and get space on / by moving things there. If you don't want to move everything below /usr there are also other candidates of directories suitable for having partitions of their own like /tmp, /var, /home and /opt. (I understand that you already have /home on a partition of its own). If your /usr/local is big it might also be a candidate for a partition of its own.

I also prefer XFCE, but sometimes run KDE applications like k3b and kdiff3.

Instead of deleting files or directories, I would prefer to remove packages to have a system with installed files that match what my package manager thinks is installed.

regards Henriks

Pithium · 10-20-2023, 01:06 PM

/usr/share is used for non executable assets in for various packages. This includes default configuration files and icons.

In particular, it holds the application launchers used by xdg compliant desktops, such as XFCE. Don't close your web browser.. because you won't be able to open it back up.

dugan · 10-20-2023, 01:12 PM

So you deleted /usr/share/applications and /usr/share/fonts? I want to see a screenshot.

business_kid · 10-20-2023, 02:00 PM

Right. I completely forgot about /usr/share fonts. Bad day for me, obviously.

It's no big deal, I can drop in an sdcard and reboot. The sdcard has boot priority and the complete system. The fonts I clean forgot. I genuinely didn't know so much other stuff was used, because I suppose so much of what's there is unused.

I can rsync /usr/share back over to the HD from the SDCard. It's backed up on disk as well. Thanks guys.

jayjwa · 10-20-2023, 04:37 PM

Remove unused packages, compress stuff you don't use much, and strip binaries that might have debug info (be careful of some like ocaml binaries you shouldn't strip). If you're desperate, you usually can remove shared libraries that are similar version. For example, if you have libwhatever.so.a.b.c, where a-c are integers, you can delete those that differ in position 'c' but not 'a' nor 'b'. Ex: libwhatever.so.1.2.20 and libwhatever.so.1.2.21 you could delete libwhatever.so.1.2.20. Make sure the short name symlink of the library points to the latest version.

Code:

libsigsegv.so.2@
libsigsegv.so.2.0.6*
libsigsegv.so.2.0.7*

Remove old Linux kernel sources, check for unruly caches and image thumbnails. Remove man pages in languages you don't use, or sections you don't care about. That /usr/share is going to hurt...

rkelsen · 10-20-2023, 05:34 PM

Instead of removing things, you can save over 1Gb by compressing the contents of /usr/doc and the kernel modules:

Code:

# for i in `find /usr/doc -type f`; do gzip $i; done
# for i in `find /lib/modules -type f -name '*.ko'`; do gzip $i; done
# depmod -a

0XBF · 10-20-2023, 05:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rkelsen

Instead of removing things, you can save over 1Gb by compressing the contents of /usr/doc and the kernel modules:

Code:

# for i in `find /usr/doc -type f`; do gzip $i; done
# for i in `find /lib/modules -type f -name '*.ko'`; do gzip $i; done
# depmod -a

Any downside to this other than some added decompressing time loading docs and modules at boot? Is the added time significant?

Just wondering why saving space like that isn't default.

rkelsen · 10-20-2023, 07:38 PM

^ No noticeable time difference here.

Maybe it's not the default because it probably would be noticeable on low end hardware.

business_kid · 10-21-2023, 07:32 AM

Thank you all for the replies and for steering me out of my mess.

Well I have my backed up /usr/share restored. Of course, with the day that was in it, the sdcard chose that exact moment to act up

But my hard disk backup did the trick. I am writing this on my RazPi.

I'm not going to search for similarly-named libraries with slightly lower versions, because it's not worth the effort. This RazPi is on current, which changes. Updating one package could break several programs. /usr/doc is gone, as I have it upstairs. kde was installed as part of the '-xfce-' image

With a full backup and a ~Current mirror, I can reinstall quicker than archiving. Normally, there's no point for an OS to save disk space. Minimum disk sizes are ever-increasing.

With RPi OS, the install was ~6G, so 25G for / looked plenty. I needed space for media. Debian Buster proved obnoxious and arm support was non-existent. Then Slarm64 & Slackware Aarch64 came along, which were different propositions.

I had 3G on / and no room for a swapfile. Slarm64 has a repo with utilities, other WMs, and browsers. Box64 even allows x86_64 stuff to run.

EDIT: I couldn't fulfill the screenshot request. I deleted /usr/share via ssh, and the X had fallen on it's sword by the time I came down

Petri Kaukasoina · 10-22-2023, 05:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rkelsen

Instead of removing things, you can save over 1Gb by compressing the contents of /usr/doc and the kernel modules:

Code:

# for i in `find /usr/doc -type f`; do gzip $i; done
# for i in `find /lib/modules -type f -name '*.ko'`; do gzip $i; done
# depmod -a

Quote:

Originally Posted by 0XBF

Any downside to this other than some added decompressing time loading docs and modules at boot? Is the added time significant?

Just wondering why saving space like that isn't default.

I compress both modules and kernel-firmware files using xz. But I don't use initrd. mkinitrd does not copy compressed modules or firmware files to the initrd.

lazardo · 10-28-2023, 04:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

I needed to save space on an undersized / partition. ...

Alternative approach:
a) use rsync '--exclude-from=' to download which eliminates well known items up front:

Code:

# example
- source/
- pasture/
- testing/
- kde/
- grub-*
- haveged-*
- hplip-*
- krb5-*
- krusader-*
- llvm-*
- netatalk-*

b) post-install, remove packages by weight:

Code:

$ pkgsize | sort -nr | head
  11534336K kernel-source-5.15.19-noarch-2
    916480K kernel-firmware-20230725_b6ea35f-noarch-1
    750592K libreoffice-7.4.2-x86_64-1alien
    402432K qt5-5.15.3_20220318_e507d3e5-x86_64-1_slack15.0
    397312K llvm-13.0.0-x86_64-2
    328704K kernel-modules-6.1.7-x86_64-1
    319488K mariadb-10.5.22-x86_64-1_slack15.0
    302080K kernel-modules-5.15.19-x86_64-2
    256000K mozilla-thunderbird-115.3.2-x86_64-1_slack15.0
    254976K mozilla-firefox-115.3.1esr-x86_64-1_slack15.0

Code:

#!/bin/bash
# pkgsize

while read a b c d; do
    case $a in
        PACKAGE) [ "$b" != "NAME:" ] && continue
            name=$c
            ;;
        UNCOMPRESSED) [ "$c" != "SIZE:" ] && continue
            size=${d:0:(-1)}
            size=$(( ${size/./} * 10 / 10 ))    # decimal

            case ${d:(-1)} in
                M) (( size *= 1024 )) ;;
                G) (( size *= ( 1024 * 1024 ) )) ;;
            esac

            printf "%10sK %s\n" $size $name
            ;;
    esac
done < <( cat /var/log/packages/* | grep '^[PU][AN]' )

enine · 10-28-2023, 06:24 PM

I'm running the minirootfs on the beagelbone black 4G storage

business_kid · 10-29-2023, 05:56 AM

Good of you to be exercising your minds on this. I did settle on a fix.

I have removed some obvious crud: kde; /usr/doc; never installed HOWTOs or Emacs; As for programs - seamonkey & thunderbird; don't have libreoffice; Obsolete & foreign fonts; pci video drivers from the last millenium, are all gone. Reinstalled /usr/share.

After adding a few preferred programs, There's 5.6G on / with the swap file on /home. My swap file is 8G(!) because Zoom, and swap file usage on Zoom was ballooning on box64. I made that ultra-big for testing purposes. But PitSeb has added this 'SAVE_MEM' option which drastically cuts memory usage.

5.6GB is not great, but it will do. I have ≅115GB of videos on home currently. I can pull those off and repartition if needed. It just means 100G of copying.

Another thing is that Slarm64 images used provide a lean version of slackware, but it now comes with everything, so install size has increased.