Debian puts the squeeze on me: /usr filled up!

jamesac · 02-08-2011, 02:47 AM

I have just upped from lenny to squeeze. I didn't mean to, really, but the package manager was well into its stride by the time I realised what was happening.

Mostly all went well, BUT /usr is now 100% full. I notice that there are duplicate files in /usr/lib, eg Oct 11 22:35 libgcj.so.10.0.0 and Sep 14 2008 libgcj.so.90.0.0 (I assume the latter has been replaced by the former?). Is it safe to remove the "outdated" lib files? Is there an elegant way of doing it?

Cheers.

jamesac · 02-08-2011, 07:43 AM

UPDATE:

So I did a bit of reading, and discovered that there is a utility deborphan that shows, err, orphaned libs. So I installed it using apt-get install deborphan.

As apt-get was doing its stuff, it displayed:

"The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:

libchipcard-libgwenhywfar47-plugins libswfdec-0.6-90 libfreebob0 [...]
...Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.

So, I did apt-get autoremove, and lo and behold, around 170 MB of stuff was cleaned up from /usr/lib.

So that seems to have sorted that.

cynwulf · 02-08-2011, 07:53 AM

Yes deborphan is useful. I tend to pipe it's output to aptitude (or apt-get if you prefer) for purging orphaned packages and configuration files.

e.g. (use at your own risk - though is only a simulation (-s))

Code:

deborphan | xargs aptitude -s purge
deborphan --find-config | xargs aptitude -s purge

It's always a good idea to run the commands first to see what will be removed.

Code:

deborphan
deborphan --find-config

You may see packages that you've install manually (with dpkg) among the output - i.e. wine. You can set up deborphan to ignore these (otherwise they'll get removed). Read it's man page for more info:

Code:

man deborphan

jamesac · 02-08-2011, 09:06 AM

Thanks very much for your help.

j1alu · 02-08-2011, 11:51 PM

You can also try:
aptitude purge ~c

and perhaps:
apt-get install localepurge