Puppy space slowly filling with unknown stuff

Booting, installing, newbie
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Benboom
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu 02 Jul 2009, 16:10

Puppy space slowly filling with unknown stuff

#1 Post by Benboom »

I have my Puppy 4.21 running nicely; connected to the net, playing my mp3s, browsing, etc. All is well! But can someone explain how I can figure out which files are unnecessary? My Puppy Space amount keeps getting smaller; I know some of this is cache files and I clear my browser files regularly, but plainly I don't have the knowledge to just start deleting things. I'm not in danger of running out of space (yet) but I feel like I really should understand this to try to prevent unnecessary stuff hogging space. What all can I look for to keep my 512M file's contents pared down as I use Puppy?

I have to say as a new user that this is one of the more confusing aspects of the OS to me; I have a Frugal install and I still don't quite understand how it works, obviously.

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Béèm
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Joined: Wed 22 Nov 2006, 00:47
Location: Brussels IBM Thinkpad R40, 256MB, 20GB, WiFi ipw2100. Frugal Lin'N'Win

#2 Post by Béèm »

As for the cache of SeaMonkey, you can set it to 0MB.
It might effect some performance issue, but it wouldn't be noticeable much.

As for the rest, please explain what programs you use and where you put the corresponding data.

Also if you experiment by installing programs, space is eaten up as well.
Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
[url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage]Consult Wikka[/url]
Use peppyy's [url=http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html]puppysearch[/url]

Benboom
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Joined: Thu 02 Jul 2009, 16:10

#3 Post by Benboom »

Crap! I posted a long reply to this and the forum lost it. I'll have to try again later as I have to get out and do some errands now.

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mikeb
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#4 Post by mikeb »

Some users have reported adding pfix=fsck to the kernel boot line (in menu.lst in your case or e for edit at the boot menu) has recovered space as it runs a file system check at boot.
Otherwise hard to tell as browser cache is a common reason..I use 0 and have yet to see a performance difference unless you are on dial up....recent pages are cached in memory anyway.

You can run gdmap from the menu and look at folder /initrd/pup_rw which should give some idea of space usage

mike

Benboom
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Joined: Thu 02 Jul 2009, 16:10

#5 Post by Benboom »

I don't seem to have anything named gdmap except four files which seem to be icon-related. There's certainly no gdmap in any of my menus. I have a Frugal installation; could that be why?

I finally found the old Firefox cache and deleted it, which freed up a dozen megs or so. I set my SeaMonky cache to 2 megs just to do it. :)

The biggest programs I have added are SeaMonkey 2, Opera 9.64 and 10 Beta, and Firefox 2. I removed all of those except Seamonkey2, and I still have the old 1.15 version. I like Opera (it's my main browser on my Mac) but both versions freeze on my Puppy system and I can't kill them. SeaMonkey 2 with Flash 10 seems to perform a lot better than Firefox 2, especially with Flash, so I got rid of the Firefox.

Other than that I don't think I've added any "big" items except putting 4 gigs of mp3s on the hard drive. Surely THAT can't be important!

I'm in no danger of running out of space here, I just want to figure out how to make sure I stay that way.

Thank you.

muggins
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Joined: Fri 20 Jan 2006, 10:44
Location: hobart

#6 Post by muggins »

With a frugal install it's useful to create a download directory, outside of your pup_save file, e.g. /mnt/home/downloads, then you can edit seamonkey/firefox to use this as the default. You can also move directories, like /root/.mozilla, to /mnt/home, then just create a symlink back to their proper location.

Code: Select all

mv /root/.mozilla /mnt/home
ln -s /mnt/home/.mozilla /root

Benboom
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#7 Post by Benboom »

muggins wrote:With a frugal install it's useful to create a download directory, outside of your pup_save file, e.g. /mnt/home/downloads, then you can edit seamonkey/firefox to use this as the default.
Great minds think alike! That is exactly what I did. I didn't know about the moving of directories and replacement with a symlink, though; that's neat.

Thanks!

aragon
Posts: 1698
Joined: Mon 15 Oct 2007, 12:18
Location: Germany

#8 Post by aragon »

Benboom wrote:I don't seem to have anything named gdmap except four files which seem to be icon-related. There's certainly no gdmap in any of my menus. I have a Frugal installation; could that be why?
in 4.2.1 use treesize from the Filesystem-Menu.

aragon

Benboom
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Joined: Thu 02 Jul 2009, 16:10

#9 Post by Benboom »

That's excellent! It shows me where everything is; really, that's the perfect answer to my question. Thanks so much.

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mikeb
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#10 Post by mikeb »

Has another good application bitten the dust? :D

Well sounds like you have the space situation under control

regards

mike

aragon
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Joined: Mon 15 Oct 2007, 12:18
Location: Germany

#11 Post by aragon »

@ mike
please try treesize, i think it's a very good replacement.

aragon

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mikeb
Posts: 11297
Joined: Thu 23 Nov 2006, 13:56

#12 Post by mikeb »

please try treesize, i think it's a very good replacement.
ok I might be coerced as long as I don't have to download 4.21 to do so :D

mike

actually if its that 'orrible tree view thingy then no thanks..hardly a substitute.
http://treesize.sourceforge.net/
like no graphics? Rox or thunar or whatever would do that.
Now a linux version of winstatdir would be progress http://windirstat.info/

Just my humble opinion of course

Pelo

Check libraries with treesize.

#13 Post by Pelo »

How to explain why a Slacko is so big with less applications ? Use treesize and check libraries, often the too much is here.
You can check your savefile opening treesize into it, via the terminal.
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Fossil
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Joined: Tue 13 Dec 2005, 21:36
Location: Gloucestershire, UK.

#14 Post by Fossil »

@Pelo. have you noticed the date of the last entry prior to yours? Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 2:54 pm. :roll:

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mikeslr
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Joined: Mon 16 Jun 2008, 21:20
Location: 500 seconds from Sol

The price of "Progress"

#15 Post by mikeslr »

Hi pelo,

Have you noticed that firefox is using 25% of your resources? And xorg another 17%?

In days of yore, when not tilting at windmills and slaying dragons, whichever came to hand :), I ran a law office using a Commodore 64; 'though quickly superseded by a Commodor 128. That's 64/128 Mbs, not Gbs; but complete with Wordprocessing, Spreadsheets, and Database Managers.

About that time, my son built and ran a bulletin-board in DOS on an IBM computer having comparable specs.

By today's standards, storage media was expensive; and RAM even more expensive. But operating systems and applications were "tightly written" because of those circumstances.

What those systems couldn't do was handle anything beyond primitive graphics.

Today, both storage media and RAM are cheap and tightly written programs no longer a priority. And the computing world is all about Graphics: Our Selfies and videos must be in "true color"; the websites we frequent must be able to quickly and accurately receive and transmit them; and our Web-browsers must be able to accurately display whatever Websites throw at them. As must our monitors. Even our word-processors, spreadsheets and presentation programs are now built to include rich graphic content.

In the last two years, both the current Opera and firefox grown from (compressed) 18+/- Gbs to 64 +/- GBs.

Every new iteration of the graphic libraries (glibs) required by even not-graphically-focused applications has involved an increase in size. And xorg --which manages the display on a monitor-- has had to grow to accommodate our monitors' capabilities to display such content.

Long for the "good old days" where verbal content was King? Run a dos-emulator and dos programs. Or at least run Focus-Writer and a text-only web browser.

But if your primary concern is that your SaveFile keeps filling up, or you have limited RAM, run applications as "Program Folders" outside your SaveFile, and move their config files and caches out of / [which is within your SaveFile] to /mnt/home. That's how I run the latest opera, firefox and Seamonkey. Palemoon --unless its a builtin-- I run under Wine as a portable-XP app, also installed to a folder on /mnt/home.

If you search --include my handles in your search terms-- you'll find several posts on this Forum about "Program Folders" and Wine programs. The techniques was actually first discussed by playdaz and explored by DaveS before I got involved. You'll also find several posts about moving "mozilla" cache out of /.

Or PM me and I'll give your some links. I've discovered that for some unknown reason if I'm signed in to the forum and open a tab to Wellminded(63.net?) to do a search, I get logged off.

mikesLr

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