My laptop has 500 GB of storage, and I'm dual-booting Linux Mint and Slackware. This has worked fine, but when trying to download software today I started getting errors that I didn't have enough memory. I have one 15 GB partition for Mint, another 15 GB for Slackware, a swap partition, and the rest of the storage is for the /home partition. Slackware seems to be filling up only the root partition I designated for Slackware and not using /home.

Here is my fstab:


/dev/sda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 / ext4 defaults 1 1
/dev/sda4 /home ext4 defaults 1 2
#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro,comment=x-gvfs-show 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

Please post the output of the following commands:

mount

df -h

1 members found this post helpful.

Are you downloading stuff as root?

Which command or utility are you using to download?

I ask because some tools download to /tmp or /var/tmp and then move the files into their final destination.

To piggyback on ttk, take a look at /tmp and /var/tmp.

It may be that those directories are full of temporary files. Emptying them out may solve your problem.

First thing would be to find out which files are filling up your root partition and where they are. To know here they are, open a terminal and type as root:then refine according to the results. For instance to check /tmp's content: Now to find big individual files, for instance those that are more than 200 M big:Be aware that depending on their verbosity's level some programs (tomcat server comes to mind) can quickly fill up you logs.

Also, it is a good habit to check /tmp content before switching off your computer and erase what you don't need to keep there.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for the responses so far. In response to some of the questions, no, I was not downloading as root. I was using KDE as a regular user and my Downloads folder is at /home/roy/Downloads.

Output of mount:
/dev/sda2 on / type ext4 (rw,commit=600)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
/dev/sda4 on /home type ext4 (rw,commit=600)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/roy/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=roy)

Output of df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 15G 9.9G 4.2G 71% /
/dev/sda4 422G 5.5G 395G 2% /home
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm

That output is after having deleted everything from /tmp, which had 4.4G of data in it. So that was probably filling up my / partition. I wonder if I should try increasing the size of that partition. I don't need as much space in /home.

I suppose that answers my issue: Just too much stuff in /tmp. I had thought there was some underlying issue and Slackware wasn't recognizing the /home partition, but I guess that is not the case. If nobody has anything to add, I suppose this is closed. Thanks again.

You can avoid this by running a 'tmpfs' mountpoint for /tmp. This puts /tmp on a "RAM drive" which is cleared at shutdown.

Enabling this is quite simple. You just add this line to your /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,size=1000m 0 0

Note that the 'size' option there is a limit. I've never needed more than a Gig or so. You may even want to make it smaller.

1 members found this post helpful.

That certainly seems like a good idea. I'll give that a try. Thank you!

Just to be clear: do Mint and Slackware share /home? If so, what is the output of mount and cat /etc/fstab on Mint?

edit: problem appears to be solved

Increasing the size of your / partition could certainly help.

I don't even have a dedicated /home partition and live very well without it.

To save room on /tmp you can also avoid using it when you know some program can put a lot of things in it. For instance you can create a /home/tmp directory that should have same ownership and permissions as /tmp.

Then you can either symlink /tmp to it, or for instance when you build a package using a SlackBuild (that can need a lot of space in /tmp, some of them even more than 1G) run the Slackbuild like this:I think this works with most if not all SlackBuilds included in Slackware and found on http://slackbuilds.org. You can check looking in the SlackBuild what is the default value for $TMP.

Yes, that is the setup. Here are the results of mount in Mint:

/dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
none on /run/user type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=104857600,mode=0755)
/dev/sda4 on /home type ext4 (rw)
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/roy/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=roy)

And here's fstab (editing out the comments):

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=0cfcc32b-3e9f-4856-acc1-7cdc273b7609 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda4 during installation
UUID=858bfc47-412f-4f52-b55e-f8ee94a6e35a /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=0f351beb-088f-4b00-a844-9fbddfa948a7 none swap sw 0 0

Everything seems to be in order.

Didier:
That seems like an excellent idea. I'll have to give it a little more thought and see if I can get that /home/tmp working with a symlink.

I haven't tried this - but it oughtta work:
in /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown, put the following:
rm -r /tmp/*

That way you always keep /tmp clean (just as if it had been in ram). and you don't need to worry (too much) about running out of ram.
Infact - in the 'good ole days', that used to happen automagically!!

Using /tmp as a link is also a good idea, but I can see some race-problems when /home is on a separate partition - the system _may_ want to put something in /tmp before the /home-partition is mounted ... I dunno

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If I had the symlink, would I be able to see what's in /tmp or would it just show me what's in /home/tmp? It would be interesting to see, with the symlink in place, what if anything is placed in /tmp before /home is mounted. I'll create the symlink and then experiment with that.

Though the solution to my problem was simple, I'm still learning a lot from this experience. I would have had a somewhat rough time finding the df and du commands on my own and never would have considered these other options. I really appreciate the ideas.

Note that the OP is saying that they ran out of memory, not disk. Probably a bad card, so a memtest is the place to start.