Help, no disk space left

[paul]

Installed Salix fine on my Compaq Armada m700 notebook; and it runs great. One minor problem has arisen, I have run out of disk space on my 6 GB hard drive, even before I managed to do anything useful. Unfortunately, the disk drive is an ATA-5 and getting a larger one is pretty well impossible.
So I am going to try adding a $20 PCMCIA adapter in the side with a 32GB Class 10 SD card, am just waiting for the adapter to arrive. I just want to know whether there is a simple way for Salix to recognise the SD card as a secondary hard drive and then place some (or all) of its programs there.

[Akuna]

If the pcmcia + sd drive is never removed from the laptop, couldn't you move the /home, and /var partitions (for example) on it and put an entry for them in /etc/fstab ?

[jayseye]

Newer ATA drives tend to be fully backward-compatible. It's still fairly easy to find drives up to 250GB at, say, sites such as http://newegg.com or even on eBay, for that matter.

Linux will bypass most BIOS limitations. Worst case, you might have to set up a small /boot/ partition within the first 8 GB.

[paul]

Hello jayseye thanks for that, the trouble is that the disk drive in the notebook has some weird pin-out system that is quite different to other notebook hard drives I have seen. As most of the hard drivers I have seen with the ATA-5 label were quite pricey, and I will not know whether I can use them until I get them in my hand, with no comeback if I cannot, I am a little reluctant to take the plunge. That is why a PCMCIA adapter and 32GB SD card seemed the better option, especially as I already have a class 10 32GB SD card lying around surplus from another project.
As far as the recommendation by Akuna is concerned, thank you for that, I intend that the SD card will be permanently present and I presume I could move /home/paul/ and the other directory /var/partitions/ with gnome commander or perhaps through the terminal. What I would like is some concise instructions on how to do this from the terminal as I presume that would be the best approach, and clear instructions on the changes I have to make in /etc/fstab. I am sorry, but I am totally green at this.

[mimosa]

First, you need to find out what Salix thinks the card is called. One way is by running gmountman (if you have it installed) or from the command line

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#parted -l

Do so without the card, then insert it and repeat. Device names are usually /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. but SD cards have quite different names.

Then if the card isn't formatted, create a suitable partition on it (perhaps using gparted) or note the name. Normal hard disk partitions are sda1, sda2, etc, but again, SD cards are I believe quite different.

Mount the partition (using gmountman or thunar) and copy whatever you want to go on the card (don't delete the original yet). Then back up your /etc/fstab:

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#cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.old

then edit /etc/fstab to add the appropriate lines. I have had trouble in the past with how the fields are separated (with spaces or tabs, I don't know) and so I will copy an existing line and edit the items. Wikipedia has a good entry on fstab which you should read first.


Possible entries might be:

[I have to look this up, and don't have time just now. When I do I'll edit this post with the info; but maybe someone else knows off the top of their head]

Then reboot and make sure all is well. You can check what is mounted by

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$mount

and make sure that /home etc are really being used in their new locations by creating some files there.

Then when you are sure all is well, delete the originals.

If you have trouble, simply revert to the old /etc/fstab and reboot:

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#cp /etc/fstab.old /etc/fstab

You may wish to back up the "new" fstab first so you can use it as a starting point for your next attempt:

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#cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.failed

Note that throughout the above, # and $ at the start of a line are the prompts showing whether you are root or the ordinary user, and you don't need to type them. To become root, type su and you will be prompted for the root password. To go back to the normal user, type Ctrl-d or exit.

I believe Wikipedia also has a good entry on partitions.

[mimosa]

Having looked into this a little further, I see a problem (though by no means a fatal one). fstab mounts directories to partitions, not to directories within them. So you have two choices, as I see it:

1) Create a partition each for home and var (probably simplest, but choose the size of the partitions carefully)
2)Stick with just one partition and mount it to a new top-level directory you will create (such as 'data') and create symlinks from your home and var to directories of those names you will create inside the SD card partition. The rest is then the same - copy the data over, test, and delete the old contents.

In either case, I am uncertain what to put in the fstab field that governs how the partition is mounted (with what permissions) so I'm going to bow out of this thread for now in the hope that a more knowledgeable person can help.

I also wonder whether there is anything that should be born in mind when moving /var on the fly.

One final point - when you change fstab, you don't need to reboot to see what it now does. Just do:

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$mount -a

[Akuna]

I would go for 2 partitions (or more) on the new hard drive, although you have to decide for the size of each one which will be a subjective choice depending on your use. But those 2 partitions are the two main ones that tend to grow (and also /tmp maybe...) while /var does not need to be as big as home (maybe 1/3 for var and 2/3 for /home ?)

[mimosa]

On a different tack completely, mate-disk-usage-analyzer (aka baobab) is a very appealing graphical tool to see just what is taking up how much space. If you don't have it, install mate-utils (if there's room at the moment!). It can be called from the commandline, or I dare say it creates itself a menu entry somewhere.

So assuming you decide to follow Akuna's suggestion, it only remains to determine what to put in the crucial fields of fstab.

The fields are:

partition XXX mount point XXX filesystem XXX options XXX dump XXX fs check

The first three should be easy to establish (depending how you partition and format your card). The final two should probably be 0 and 2, though I'm not entirely sure about dump (look into it if you like). As for the mount options, you want these partitions to be mounted automatically on boot, writable as well as readable, and accessible to the right users. I would tentatively suggest 'defaults' (without the quotes) for both /home and /var. So the two lines are going to look something like this:

/dev/card0 /home /ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/card1 /var /ext2 defaults 1 2

EDIT Changed 'dump' from 0 to 1 in line with majority opinion (but I'm still not sure)

ext2, because a non-journaling filesystem is kinder to your card. But that's your choice to make at the partitioning stage.

[paul]

Thanks for that. Sorry about the delay in reply. Unfortunately I have come once to this Site and it would not let me post, no matter what I tried (I logged in 3 times and tried, no luck). And the second time I could not get into this Site at all. Anyhow, it has not been my week as I was sent a dud PCMCIA to SD card adapter so will have to get a new one of these before I proceed. Probably will take another 3 weeks.

[mimosa]

I'm sorry to hear that! Meanwhile, so you can have a workable system, I suppose you could delete something. Do try mate-disk-usage-analyzer. Also, you could remove a heavy application you don't use. The office suite, for example (libreoffice) takes up around 300MB and there are lighter alternatives such as Abiword.

Another approach would be to reinstall but install Basic (which gives you a graphical interface, a browser and not much more) then add the applications you want. However, if you want to use wireless, you'd need access to an ethernet connection initially in order to install wicd (probably the best networking option in most cases, and the default), which is only included in Full.