no disk space; ubuntu on chromebook

[hannah7]

Hi everyone

Forgive me for being a total beginner! So I've installed Ubuntu 12.04 onto my Chromebook via Crouton, and the only programs I've installed are Chromium and Eclipse then Oracle JDK 8 and the Android SDK. I got half way through installing some of the packages on the SDK Manager when it told me I had no disk space left! Surely having only installed 4 things I have a bit more to spare?? The SDK is saved in my Downloads folder at the moment (where I apparently have 245.8MB left) and when I tried to copy into a new folder in /opt or /usr/local, both times again these folders said they had no space left. Please tell me I'm doing something wrong and that I can actually install more than a measly browser, IDE, JDK and the Android SDK!? I know Chromebooks don't have a lot of space but it seems crazy I've ran out already!

Thanks!

Hannah

[Mike_Walsh]

Hallo, Hannah.

I must confess, I'm quite surprised, upon Googling 'Chromebook Specifications', to discover that they appear to come with an average of only 16 GB of storage (usually an SSD, I believe?)

That said, I'm running an entire operating system (Xubuntu 14.04, one of the Ubuntu derivatives) from a 16 GB flash drive. I have three browsers installed, Wine (for running Windows programs, of which I use a couple), a couple of dozen programs, loads of desktop widgets, a 'swap' space of 3 GB......and the drive is STILL less than 60% full.

So, I would be surprised if you actually needed the entire SSD (or anywhere NEAR the whole thing) for a 'productive' system. I'm still fairly new to Linux myself, but something's not right there.

My Ubuntu desktop install, with over 180 apps in total, is only occupying 22.5 GB of a 160 GB hard drive!

How did you install 12.04 to your Chromebook? Did you use the 'install alongside Chrome' option.....or did you opt to replace Chrome with 12.04? If you've installed alongside Chrome, then, allowing for at least 2-3 GB of 'swap' space, that alone would account for nearly 9 GB of your total of 16 GB.

Let us know which model of Chromebook you're using, please; that will allow us to see what your specs are.

With limited storage space, it might be an idea to consider using one of the lighter 'flavours' of Ubuntu, such as Xubuntu or Lubuntu (both of which I use myself). I have a very old Dell laptop, with a 20 GB hard drive; it runs 32-bit Lubuntu, and the result is a very nice little system, which happily does everything I ask of it.

Regards,

Mike.

[yancek]

You can find out how large each partition is, how much of it is used and how much free from a terminal with: df -h

[Bucky Ball]

... or you can open Gparted and have a look with a GUI ...

[hannah7]

Hi everyone,

Yes, Mike, mine does indeed only come with 16GB SSD. I do run it 'alongside' Chrome, so I switch back and forth, as opposed to 'instead of.' Would you suggest in that case installing Xubuntu or Lubuntu?

Yancek/Bucky Ball, these are the results from df -h:

(precise)gy13her@localhost:~$ sudo df -h
[sudo] password for gy13her:
df: `/mnt/stateful_partition': No such file or directory
df: `/usr/share/oem': No such file or directory
df: `/mnt/stateful_partition/encrypted': No such file or directory
df: `/home/chronos': No such file or directory
df: `/run/debugfs_gpu': No such file or directory
df: `/home/.shadow/9acfd5662b56ad479da9edf711067f7e98f58183/mount': No such file or directory
df: `/home/chronos/user': No such file or directory
df: `/home/user/9acfd5662b56ad479da9edf711067f7e98f58183': No such file or directory
df: `/home/chronos/u-9acfd5662b56ad479da9edf711067f7e98f58183': No such file or directory
df: `/home/root/9acfd5662b56ad479da9edf711067f7e98f58183': No such file or directory
df: `/run/crw': No such file or directory
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 11G 9.7G 298M 98% /
/dev/root 11G 9.7G 298M 98% /
devtmpfs 938M 0 938M 0% /dev
tmp 940M 176K 939M 1% /tmp
run 188M 20K 188M 1% /run
shmfs 940M 26M 914M 3% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 11G 9.7G 298M 98% /home
/dev/mapper/encstateful 11G 9.7G 298M 98% /var
media 11G 9.7G 298M 98% /media
/dev/sda1 11G 9.7G 298M 98% /usr/local
none 940M 0 940M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none 938M 0 938M 0% /dev/pstore
/dev/sda1 11G 9.7G 298M 98% /
devtmpfs 938M 0 938M 0% /dev
shmfs 940M 26M 914M 3% /dev/shm
tmp 940M 176K 939M 1% /tmp
tmpfs 188M 20K 188M 1% /run
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
run 940M 564K 939M 1% /var/host/dbus
run 940M 564K 939M 1% /var/host/shill
run 940M 564K 939M 1% /var/host/cras
/dev/mapper/encstateful 3.1G 45M 3.1G 2% /var/host/timezone
/dev/root 1.2G 1001M 204M 84% /lib/modules/3.8.11
run 940M 564K 939M 1% /var/host/udev
media 940M 0 940M 0% /var/host/media
/home/.shadow/9acfd5662b56ad479da9edf711067f7e98f58183/vault 11G 9.7G 298M 98% /home/gy13her/Downloads
none 940M 0 940M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup

Even I can see that some of these directories are at 98%...but so many are at 0% and 1% also I was rather hoping there was a bit more space to give!

Thanks,

Hannah

[Bucky Ball]

Yes, Xubuntu or particularly Lubuntu are lighter. A minimal install and just add what you are going to use along with a lightweight desktop environment (xfce4 or lxde, though there are lighter) lightest.

Please use [code] tags when posting code. Neater and easier to read. Thanks. (See the last link in my signature for how.)

[Elfy]

Installing a stock anything isn't going to make a huge amount of difference to disk usage.

Try running

sudo du -h --max-depth=1 /

[jdeca57]

I searched 'crouton disk space requirements' and found this link:

https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/403

Depending on what you installed earlier it seems that on a 16 GB machine you should have access to several GB making your installation entirely possible. The disk space problems seems to have it's origin in chromeos and the way crouton is installed, not so much in Ubuntu. By the way, you can also consider later versions of Ubuntu since they may be better adapted to recent kernels since the chroot environment runs on the chromeos kernel.

[stalkingwolf]

for my reading chromeos can take as much as 9.6 gb of disk space and 12.04 from 4 to 6 gb that would mean only about 1.5 gb left for extras. and as i recall there is a bit knocked off for the system so you cant totally max the drive out.

[hannah7]

Ok, Elfy, this is the output from sudo du -h --max-depth =1/

1.1M	./.local
24K	./.compiz-1
2.6M	./.eclipse
4.0K	./.gvfs
12K	./.gnome2
12K	./.dbus
36K	./.pki
516K	./.android
29M	./.config
176K	./.gconf
36K	./.pulse

6.7G	./Downloads
4.0K	./Desktop
84K	./.fontconfig
30M	./.cache
6.8G	.

Any further ideas? I'm leaning towards installing Lubuntu instead, although the online material on doing that for Chromebooks seems pretty sparse as I'd want to do it without a USB stick if possible.

Thanks

Hannah