Ubuntu - /usr is full up, recommend anything in there I can delete?

Solution 1:

Have you tried "sudo apt-get clean", "apt-get autoclean", and "apt-get autoremove"? If you use "man apt-get" that will describe what each does and may free some space.

Solution 2:

I had a similar problem. First step was to find the top ten space hogs:

# cd /usr/share
# du -sm * | sort -rn | head -10

/usr/share/doc was 759MB on my system. Space that could be useful for other purposes. With *nix you can move things around without breaking things. In my case I had plenty of free space on /home which was on a different partition:

# mkdir -p /home/share/doc
# mv /usr/share/doc/* /home/share/doc
# rmdir /usr/share/doc
# ln -s /home/share/doc /usr/share/doc 

If you are really desparate, you can always mount an external hard drive and perform a similar relocation process. The thing to watch for in that case is that you don't move anything critical to the system startup to the external drive. /usr/src is another candidate, but I wouldn't move /usr/lib, too risky.

Solution 3:

/usr/share/doc
/usr/src

Solution 4:

Another option not explored is to resize the partitions with the gparted livecd. Backup your critical data first though and be prepared to loose the lot just in case. I have done a resize a few times before and not had an issue so it's quite a robust procedure.

Another extension to this is that he could move everything from /usr to another larger partition linking it with a symbolic link to the new location. Then using gparted you can remove the old /usr partition and merge /usr into the other partition.

Personally, I don't see the need to separate partitions for /usr /home etc like the old days. It often results in more issues than it solves (i.e. running out of space). Still, that's just my opinion.