Hello,
After nearly 6 months using Linux the OS gets extremely rich as you have all the programs you need, most programs that you compile from source will not have any dependency problems, and gradually your desktop becomes very good looking

on the other hand all this comes on the expense of your disk space.
I have a 7 GB drive with Linux on it and this morning kwikdisk showed 444 kb of free space available and this was not the first time

moved some programs installed in the home folder and deleted my mailbox and that gave me about 170 MB

now I would like to know how to delete unwanted programs and their dependencies, the useless files created by the OS (like the hidden folders "found*" in windows), and any other means for providing more free space

and another little question: how much space is enough for a Linux system?

Depends on your needs. Damn Small Linux is 50MB on disc. I'm sure there are embedded devices that run on less...

You might check your /boot directory for old kernels and the /var/log directory to see if any log files have gotten out of control.

use the find command to find files of a specified size. and the du command to check for disk usage.

One more option: get any packet manager, they vary depending on your distro, examine what you have and prune what you don't need to have.

If you use a Debian based distro, deborphan, debfoster and localepurge will help clear away some space. deborphan (or orphaner for teh gui-ish version) looks for orphaned libraries and purges them through apt. However it sees libraries used as dependencies for compiled programs as orphans. So if you compile a lot of packages, be careful. debfoster goes through some of your packages asking if you wish to keep them. If you don't, it removes not only that package, but the packages that it's keeping installed. If you answer yes, it won't ask you about that package again. Localepurge asks for your locale, and then deletes man pages and other documentation not in that locale, and it runs everytime after apt. Using those tools, I kept my install down under 2 GB.

Try this first command - it will list your major directories. As mentioned above, /var is probably one to look for (ignore the first line). Pick a bad guy, then try the second command, using that directory (say /var)Each command will take a while, so be patient. If it is /var/log that shows up, check that logrotate is active.

Thank you all for your replies,

@pljvaldez
The distros I use are at least a CD if not more (openSuSE and mandriva) and the /var/log size is 17 MB


The first thing I did was trying orphaner as -Ay- recommended
I showed only 5 files and since I do not know which one do I need I left them all

Then I found out that syg00 command doing the same job that FSview does

/usr folder was 3.5 GB
/var folder was ~380 MB

I deleted something from someplace (I really do not remember but most likely from /var because currently it is 244 MB) after a while I found 3 games that I never played when I tried to remove them from synaptic I got the following error message:

Well after this what can I do?

another thing the largest folder inside those folders is /var/lib and /usr/lib

what can I do to these folders?

Thanks again for your help