Why are we allowed to install software until our hard drive is too full,

jamison20000e · 07-16-2023, 12:09 PM

shouldn't somewhere know what it's going to unpack to?

I'm still having this issue with prerelease 13...

doesn't look like disk quotas are recognized by apt?

enigma9o7 · 07-16-2023, 12:44 PM

I've never used quotas and this may not be helpful, but aren't quotas for user accounts? When you install with sudo apt you're installing as sudo for all users, so wouldn't affect the users disk quota, other than maybe a few config files that might generate when you launch it.

jamison20000e · 07-16-2023, 05:49 PM

Yeah I read very little about that before seeing it wasn't for apt. I should have mentioned by now that it's more of a rant...

I like my older systems and guess I just need to upgrade some storage sizes. As an extreme example I would think if installing 10 times more than the space had, it would stop us instead of trying and locking up?

It's normally not that extreme tho at least 90% of the time my fault!

Also have to appreciate its a work in progress...

it knows the download size, just not unpacking and installing?

CLI always helped, this time was able to run Bleachbit from GUI and after that I uninstalled some stuff. ✌

Add: searching bug report Debian lets me install more than my drive capacity only gets "about 423.000 results" (sloppy search I know) guessing this has been said: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting#filedalready but if I ever get time,,, this looks like a good rabbit hole: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/

rokytnji · 07-16-2023, 07:26 PM

I deal with a 16gig chromebook. Kinda limits my iso choices.

Right now I keep the install at 7 gigs because of my symlinks in /home to external usb drive.

wpeckham · 07-16-2023, 11:09 PM

Most operating systems, including most UNIX style operating systems, assume that there is an operator at the keyboard monitoring space and other resources as needed. Why would anyone continue trying to install software when nearly out of space?

pan64 · 07-17-2023, 01:23 AM

There is a reserved space on the disk, which can only be used by root. See for example here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...filesystem-why
Setting disk quota for root looks not really useful.
apt is a simple program, it doesn't care about free disk space, it will use as much as it needs.
But anyway (if I remember well) you can set a TMP dir for a lot of apps (including apt) and they will use that instead of /tmp.
You can also mount /tmp and/or /var as an independent filesystem, so they don't come at the expense of /.

Yes, additionally checking the available resources is pointless, apt will definitely fail in case of "out of resources". What do you expect, how can it be fixed? It will report "not enough space" instead of "disk full"?

fatmac · 07-17-2023, 05:40 AM

Why are you installing so much?

I have even installed AntiX Base on a 2GB ram, 8GB M2 SSD thin client, with space to spare, & it has all the programs that a regular desktop user would need, ready & waiting.

wpeckham · 07-17-2023, 12:25 PM

Just a thought:
I have a machine that is using BTRFS only. All of the storage space is flexible, and adjusts as needed transparently so that no file system runs out of space until EVERYTHING is out of space. That you cannot do with EXT2/3/4, XFS, JFS, NTFS, FAT-*, or RaiserFS. (I am not sure about ZFS, it is way different!) Without knowing what the REAL problem here is I cannot be sure it would resolve your issues, but converting to BTRFS might be worth looking into.

Of course, nothing replaces paying attention to your system status, statistics, logs, and restrictions for yourself!

pan64 · 07-18-2023, 01:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wpeckham

Just a thought:
I have a machine that is using BTRFS only. All of the storage space is flexible, and adjusts as needed transparently so that no file system runs out of space until EVERYTHING is out of space. That you cannot do with EXT2/3/4, XFS, JFS, NTFS, FAT-*, or RaiserFS. (I am not sure about ZFS, it is way different!) Without knowing what the REAL problem here is I cannot be sure it would resolve your issues, but converting to BTRFS might be worth looking into.

Of course, nothing replaces paying attention to your system status, statistics, logs, and restrictions for yourself!

This is a different approach. I mean it means [it looks like] we do not really use partitions, but all the available space "in one".
If you really want to have a working system you need an independent partition for the OS.

jamison20000e · 07-18-2023, 07:03 PM

On a Thinkpad T420 installing a few games is what got me, now on my IBM T20 only some text based games like GNU-Chess or BSD games. It might even have a GUI but I haven't typed startx on it for years?

The T420 I keep pretty full as it's one of my daily drivers, think I'm just gonna get a new 2.5" SSD.

Thanks all!

jamison20000e · 07-19-2023, 02:00 PM

Got some more cleanning done, Filelight came in handy; I uninstalled Google Chrome a while ago but it was still littered all thought home.

Maybe at a CLI, like Filelight:

Code:

ls -lS /* | less

or

Code:

du

anyone got any good commands for file size lists, maybe

Code:

find

rokytnji · 07-19-2023, 05:31 PM

Been filling up this fresh install with backups. But this box has 1 TB drive.

Code:

harry@shop:~
$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            5.9G     0  5.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           1.2G  2.8M  1.2G   1% /run
/dev/sda3        72G   16G   53G  23% /
tmpfs           5.0M   16K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           2.4G     0  2.4G   0% /dev/shm
cgroup           12K     0   12K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           1.2G  4.0K  1.2G   1% /run/user/107
tmpfs           1.2G   20K  1.2G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sda5        57G  9.5G   45G  18% /media/harry/rootantiX23
/dev/sdc1       932G   43G  890G   5% /media/harry/Seagate
/dev/sda4       783G  2.9G  740G   1% /media/harry/4a7cd857-572c-4144-b7f7-1bd26d978a95

A lot of the backup is on the seagate external drive.

rtmistler · 07-19-2023, 08:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jamison20000e

Why are we allowed to install software until our hard drive is too full?

I guarantee you if we were not allowed, we'd complain

Quote:

Originally Posted by jamison20000e

shouldn't somewhere know what it's going to unpack to?

The tools do have a concept of the default location, which you can override.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jamison20000e

doesn't look like disk quotas are recognized by apt?

Sure they are, when you run out of space it faults and tells you insufficient space. But to add to that certain package managers will summarize prior to executing, giving you the option to assess before doing.

Q.E.D.