On Sun, Jul 01, 2018 at 01:17:47PM -0700, Charlie Gibbs wrote: > I've been banging my head against the wall trying to compile OpenSSL clients > on my Jessie laptop (see my recent posting titled "Can't link to OpenSSL on > my laptop). I've decided to upgrade it to Stretch like my desktop machine, > which compiles these programs successfully. However, "sudo apt-get > dist-upgrade" shows the message: > > E: You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/. > > apt-get autoclean doesn't help; neither does apt-get clean. When I tried > apt-get autoremove, the upgrade started, but at 99% completion it threw the > message: > > Error writing to output file - write (28: No space left on device) > > Sure enough, / is full, with all the fun that that entails. > > Is Jessie's default partitioning insufficient for Stretch, or have I somehow > filled up / with extraneous junk? Would I be better off backing up /home, > wiping the disk (e.g. with cfdisk) and starting from scratch? (Probably - I > should probably split /var into a separate partition anyway.)
This is just a classic disk space problem, we can work it out. Let's look at your options. 1. Grab a USB stick, mkfs.ext4 upon it, and mount it as /mnt/tmp. Copy /var/cache/apt/archives/ to it. Double check. rm /var/cache/apt/archives/*. Mount the USB stick as /var/cache/apt/archives. Proceed with the upgrade. When done, unmount the USB stick and reboot. Pros: this should work and not cause you to do much work. Cheap. Cons: you might run into disk space problems again. 2. Buy a nice SSD and a USB-SATA cable. Install stretch on it, keeping to two partitions: / and /home. Copy over /home from your internal disk. When it's all done, swap the internal disk for the SSD. Pros: clean system nice fast SSD partitions the size you want them to be Cons: expensive, relatively slow to do. 3. Backup /home, wipe this disk and reinstall, then restore /home. Pros: clean system cheap Cons: takes a long time, during which your system is completely out of commission. If something goes wrong, you may need to buy a new disk anyway. > After this experience, I'm gun-shy about upgrading a system in place. It's just a filesystem-full problem. They're as common as people not making good backups. > BTW is it ok to sudo apt-get, or should I su root and run it from an actual > root prompt? No difference for this. Differences only come when environment variables are important. -dsr-