Learning Old School Linux Read online

This tells me that I have only 492MB free on my computer. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but these days we're so greedy with disk space that it won't last long if I don't watch it carefully.

  Yet I am seeing only 1.4GB total space, and I expect 4GB?

  Some Eee Silliness

  Something that is confusing about this picture is that the little Asus Eee that I am using is doing something a bit silly with its file systems. In order to be able to restore the original software on boot, the Eee keeps a read-only copy of all the software distributed with the system. This is typical in the PDA world of Palm, but not very usual with a computer system. With a computer like the Eee, there's really no need for this, as the computer can be restored from a USB device. I have found a way to remove this business and recover that disk space, but I haven't tried it yet.

  Using du

  The du command (which stands for "disk usage") will show you how much space is used in each subdirectory. Here's my accumulation of mail messages on my Eee. (Frightening—110MB after only a few months!)

  ~/Mail $ du -h

  16K ./friends

  68M ./rmiug

  4.0K ./drafts

  2.7M ./CLUE

  12K ./returned

  24K ./cygwin

  188K ./science

  368K ./school

  600K ./oracle

  1.4M ./other

  11M ./opera

  9.3M ./mingw

  3.0M ./spam

  2.1M ./archive/mail

  2.1M ./archive

  12M ./junk

  16K ./me

  110M .