root partition full

[Qqmike]

Ha!

[Snowhog]

Reopened.

[Qqmike]

I see that it is 6 pages, but sometimes people like to have a little "after glow" = follow-up comments or questions, after thoughts, even for a short while, like a few hours ...

[Snowhog]

Closing this Thread.

[Robert24]

Thank you all for your answers and your support. I managed to successfully re-install Kubuntu 22.04 on my laptop and it seems to work perfectly. I wouldn't have managed it without you.

Have a great day!

[Robert24]

Thanks a lot for your answer oshunluvr,

I apologize for missing the fact that with BTRFS format you don't need separate partitions. I thought that you had different partitions but that they were somehow able to adjust to the needs. I mixed up partitions and subvolumes. Anyway. Thank you very much for taking the time to write this long and detailed answer. I will now proceed with the installation!

[oshunluvr]

Schwarzer Kater Thanks a lot for your answer. I used the first option and it worked. Now I deleted 4 partitions: root, home, swap, and backup. I started the re-installation of Kubuntu, and I'm at the Disk Setup stage. I chose the "manual" option (all others would delete my windows partition(s)). On top of the window, it's written "Prepare partitions" and one can indeed create new partitions. I have 224'547 MB of "free space" so I guess I will create two partitions, one with around 40GB (40'000 MB), with mount point "/" and one with all the rest, with mount point "/home".
I need to choose from a drop down menu "Use as:" and this seems to be the disk format. From what I understood, the two encouraged options are either "Ext4 journaling file system" or "btrfs journaling file system". I was thinking of going for the btrf option which many seem to encourage.
Am I missing something?
By the way I read this thread which was recommended:
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...-working/page2
but it confused me more than it helped me understand, I have to admit . The center of the discussion seems to be this "efi" partition, which I think I already have and do not intend on touching if not necessary.

Anyway, thanks again for your support and have a great week!

Again - a restatement: If you are going to use BTRFS, you do not need and should not have a separate /home partition. If you use EXT4 then you might want a /home partition. Other that that, all looks OK. If you mess with or delete the EFI partition, not only will Kubuntu not install but Windows will no longer boot.

In my opinion, you've already had to wipe and reinstall once because you had a root partition that was too small. Why once again potentially subject yourself to the same situation by partitioning and using EXT4 when you can have all your space as one partition? BTRFS will allow your root and home subvolumes to expand and contract as needed all without you doing anything. "Subvolumes" are with BTRFS uses instead of partitioning. The subvolumes all reside on a single partition and share the free space as needed. If you make a separate home partition then you've eliminated half the reason to use BTRFS in the first place.

To show you what I mean, here is the output of df on my system minus tempfs and other irrelevant things:

stuart@office:~$ df -h
Filesystem       Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p3   500G  355G  138G  73% /
/dev/nvme0n1p3   500G  355G  138G  73% /subvol
/dev/nvme0n1p3   500G  355G  138G  73% /home
​

Notice all these mount points are on the same partition. All show the exact same amount of used and free space - because they are all on the same partition (file system). The /subvol mount is not a subvolume, it's the full partition itself. There is so much used space because there are other subvolumes on that file system that are not mounted and thus don't show up in df output. There other subvolumes are other bootable installations and a snapshots folder where I keep daily snapshots. Here's the contents of /subvol:

stuart@office:~$ ll /subvol
total 24K
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  160 Aug  7 08:06  ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  178 Jul 11 07:37  ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.3K Dec 14  2022  dailysnapshots*
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  166 Dec 15  2022 '@grub'/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  178 Jul 11 07:37 '@KDEneon'/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root   32 Jun 20 12:42 '@KDEneon_home'/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  190 Aug  3 11:14 '@Kubuntu2004'/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  704 Aug  7 07:38  snapshots/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  154 Aug  3 09:00 '@Ubuntu_Server_2204'/
​

My main distro is KDEneon. You can see here I have a separate home for that install: @KDEneon_home. The other installs - Kubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu Server 22.04, do not have separate homes.

Ubuntu based BTRFS installs will use two subvolumes by default: @ for / and @home for /home. You will not see these unless you mount the file system the way I have. There's a ton of threads on this forum about various BTRFS uses and even a subsection for it. If you decide to use BTRFS you will have plenty of resources for information available.

[oshunluvr]

I thought I had said this before, but to reiterate: ANY partition in use will be LOCKED to prevent destruction of a running operating system. 

Your LiveUSB session detected and mounted the SWAP partition. This is expected.

[Robert24]

Schwarzer Kater Thanks a lot for your answer. I used the first option and it worked. Now I deleted 4 partitions: root, home, swap, and backup. I started the re-installation of Kubuntu, and I'm at the Disk Setup stage. I chose the "manual" option (all others would delete my windows partition(s)). On top of the window, it's written "Prepare partitions" and one can indeed create new partitions. I have 224'547 MB of "free space" so I guess I will create two partitions, one with around 40GB (40'000 MB), with mount point "/" and one with all the rest, with mount point "/home".
I need to choose from a drop down menu "Use as:" and this seems to be the disk format. From what I understood, the two encouraged options are either "Ext4 journaling file system" or "btrfs journaling file system". I was thinking of going for the btrf option which many seem to encourage.
Am I missing something?
By the way I read this thread which was recommended:
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...-working/page2
but it confused me more than it helped me understand, I have to admit . The center of the discussion seems to be this "efi" partition, which I think I already have and do not intend on touching if not necessary.

Anyway, thanks again for your support and have a great week!

[Schwarzer Kater]

You could e.g. either
sudo swapoff /dev/sda7 in the Konsole terminal emulator (also see man swapoff) to temporarily disable it and modify it afterwards (and don't forget to modify your swap entry in /etc/fstab accordingly(!) - to disable it permanently comment out the swap line in /etc/fstab and reboot)
or
boot from a GParted live USB stick (https://gparted.org/download.php) to be able to modify all of your partitions (be careful with that and have a working backup of the drive's important data on a seperate drive!).

[Robert24]

Thanks for your reply GreyGeek. I would do this btrfs set up if I wasn't blocked by this indestructible swap partition. As soon as I'll know how to wipe it out, I'll try out your recommendation.

[GreyGeek]

Well, to each his own!

I do a LOT of experimenting with applications, installations, coding (Python in 14 different projects) and just plain old simple wild hairs. I use debs, tars, flatpaks and appimages. The last two types are easy to remove, and systemd makes removing rogue sockets, etc., easy to remove as well. Sometimes installing an application creates "dependencies" with existing libraries that didn't exist before and your app wants to take your entire desktop with it if you delete it. Before I began using BTRFS restoring my system could take several hours or even days and, on occasions, resulted in a complete reinstall to clear things up. I see this happening on this forum regularly. Someone posts a msg asking for help in fixing their broken system after they've spent two or three days, or longer, trying to restore it to a working condition.

Now I don't mess with any uninstalls. Before I start a new project or install the app de jour I create a snapshot of my system. When I am done playing around I rollback to the snapshot. Total rollback time: a second or two to move @ to @old and another few seconds to type "btrfs subvol snapshot /mnt/snapshots/@xyz /mnt/@" and then reboot. When I am booted back up I use "btrfs subvol delete -C /mnt/@old", and close the Konsole. (BTW, I merged my @home into @ and deleted the @home subvolume, so I have only one snapshot to contend with and don't have to coordinate a version of @ with a version of @home.)

Another thing I like about BTRFS is that it is auto tuning. The are only a few settings and the only parameter setting I've used is to convert a subvolume from ro to rw or back.

[Robert24]

I'm attaching here a screen shot of my partitions (this one is taken from my actual current Kubuntu session (the one I will wipe out)). As mentioned in the previous message, only the /dev/sda7 is locked when I use the usb live key.

[Robert24]

I get that most people recommend me a clean install, but I'm not sure how to proceed. When I select the "Guided option" it shows me a "Before and After" picture representing the state of the partition. It doesn't look great. It would create an additional partition made of around 50 GB taken from the current /home partition, without modifying the current / partition.
Now, looking at this thread:
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...i-boot-working
recommended by Schwarzer Kater , I realized that before any installation, I can chose the option "Try out Kubuntu" when I boot from the usb live key and modify the partitions at this point.

So, as an experiment, I shrunk my home partition which was next to the root partition and I then used the reclaim space to increase the root partition. After, this I could reboot my Kubuntu session and the problem seemed fixed. But I want to follow your advice and do a clean installation. For this, I guess that the first step would be to delete all existing partitions related to Kubuntu. It looks feasible except for the swap partition. This one doesn't seem possible to modify (even when using the live key and the "Try out Kubuntu") and it has a little lock icon. It's annoying because it is in between some partitions and so it splits the space in two. Any idea what might be the issue here?

[claydoh]

Thanks for your reply claydoh . But if I use the automatic install option, what happens to my messy partitioning? Shouldn't I at least try to merge this backup partition into my root partition?

I am in agreement with oshunluvr that starting completely from scratch is probably the best path, though I have only lightly skimmed this thread. I also agree that swap isn't a dire necessity. But a clean slate will fix these issues here, and a fresh install will provide a swap file automatically.