Making space on de-googled chromebook

Beginners
1

I bought a de-googled Acer Chromebook R11 on eBay. It already had Linux Mint installed. Other than that it was supposed to be clean. I keep getting messages about it running out of space. I tried using the Software Manager to get rid of some stuff I didn’t need, but I don’t really see that much stuff there.

It was using an app called Timeshift to do snapshots. I set it up for monthly snapshots and deleted all but a couple of the saved snaps.

Trash was/is empty.

What am I missing?

I’m gonna go cut some firewood now. Fortunately my chainsaw is all analog.

Thanks in advance,
Jon

2

May be you could use the SD card slot for adding more storage … by moving your “Home” folder to say a 64 to 256 Gb SD card it would free up a lot of space and have the added benefit of keeping “Timeshift” snapshots of the operating system along with your Personal “Home” files separate …? SD cards in the above mentioned capacities … $15 to $50 …

3

I have not worked with a chromebook, however we can just treat it like any other box. I believe the suggestion about adding an SD card is an excellent one!

Can you open a terminal and type df -h and give us the output? Also, an ls -l /var/log? Log files can eat up a lot of ‘hidden’ space. So can crash dumps, if there are any in /var/crash.

Depending on how much memory it has, and how much applications etc were loaded with Mint, you might not have much space to begin with.

4

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 386M 1.6M 385M 1% /run
/dev/mapper/vgmint-root 28G 25G 1.5G 95% /
tmpfs 1.9G 34M 1.9G 2% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
/dev/mmcblk0p1 511M 6.1M 505M 2% /boot/efi
tmpfs 386M 112K 386M 1% /run/user/1000

THANKS!
Should I try that other command too?
I’m very new to working in the terminal so trying to be extra careful

5

Thanks!
I’ll definitely get an sd card!

1 Like
6

Yep, there you are nearly full.
If you can, yes run those other commands. They do not change anything, just printing out some text.
One other one that might be good to know would be: du -sh /home/*

Just some basic commands looking for areas where you typically would see files grow etc. With your root directory “/” being that large, you basically have an ‘all in one’ type setup (meaning /home is not separate).

ETA: I was curious about install size, particularly since I don’t use Mint. My own system here the OS portion is 40G in size.

7

Very wise and like chopping wood, working with the terminal is a great skill to have.

Thank you @mcron for these commands!

Just to help you understand what these do… (one newby to another)

In the terminal type:
df --help
to learn a bit about that command.

Basically df is a Disk File (space used) command and the -h flag means
-h, --human-readable

Disk Use is also suggested by @mcron

du --help replies Summarize device usage of the set of FILEs...

-h, --human-readable  print sizes in human readable format
-s, --summarize       display only a total for each argument

the last part of the command /home/* tells du to look at ALL (*) the home directories.

2 Likes
8

Thanks! This helps!
Or perhaps more appropriately:
Tusen Takk, det var veldig hjelpsom!
Jon

9

What is the exact model of the Chromebook?

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Acer Chromebook R11 a.k.a Acer C738T
It’s supposed to have:
32 GB SSD
4GB DDR 3L RAM
Celeron 1.6 Ghz processor

11

It has a eMMC soldered on Solid state drive either 16gb or 32gb… so not upgradeable
Open “Disks” from your menu and check the drive size and partitions info.