10.4 Update with limited space

[tomsimmons]

Afternoon All

I apologise now if this has already been asked.

I have a eeePC 901, currently installed with 9.10, and pretty much fully updated.

If I try and update to 10.04 using the package update, it fails due to lack of space, OS is in the 4GB SSD.

Is there some way that I can perform the update without a re-install?


Thanks


Tom

[lemming465]

This should be possible, but you'll need to provide about 2GB of extra storage to /var/cache/apt. Assuming you have an additional 16GB SSD with a partition containing enough free space mounted at /data (or a micro SD card, or external USB disk, or ...), this could look like:

sudo -i
mkdir /data/alt.var.cache.apt
cd /var/cache
cp -a apt /data/alt.var.cache.apt
mv apt apt.old
ln -s /data/alt.var/cache.apt/apt .

If your disk space is mounted somewhere other than /data or your directory is named something else, adjust the paths accordingly. You can reverse the process when you are done with the upgrade.

[tomsimmons]

Thanks for your reply.

I'm afraid I'm going to ask a stupid question now...

Having got home and looked at the machine I can see from System Monitor that the 4GB SSD is mounted at / and the 16SSD is mounted at /home. So do I have a /data?

Tom

[lemming465]

No, you don't have a /data, but the path isn't important, the extra disk space somewhere other than root (where /var is) is important. Just subsituted "/home" in all the directions where it said "/data", assuming /home has around 3 GB of free space. You can see how much free space you have with df -m

[tomsimmons]

Hmm

OK, I followed your instructions, replacing /home for /data, adjust what I think is a typo on the last line where you have a slash in the middle of the new dir name?

I then performed a restart, seeing as the machine has been up for ages and been through a bucket load of sleeps.

Upon restart the Update Manager comesup, clicked OK for upgrade however it has still come up saying not enough space on /

Any ideas?

Tom

[lemming465]

Could we see the output from df -m?

You are right about the / for . typo, sorry about that.