(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

So I have this netbook; her name's Io and she runs Ubuntu. Io has a hard drive of a few hundred meg. She also has a permanently inserted memory card of sixteen gig. Every time I start her up, she complains about hard drive space and her lack thereof. How do I convince her that the memory card is her hard drive? Or at least convince Update Manager to download updates onto the memory card? Because I haven't saved a single thing to disk on Io that isn't an update from Update Manager.

Comments

[swisscelt]

So, how attached (excuse the pun) are you to the data on the attached memory card? If you can wipe it clean and start over, or even if you can take a backup first and start over, I'd recommend installing LVM. I know, from looking around Google-land, that LVM is available for Ubuntu (and has been since 7.04, if not before) but having never used LVM on Ubuntu I can't tell you if it's an option on initial install as it is with Fedora/Red Hat. If you can get it straight from the Live CD, that would be best, as configuring LVM after the fact is a bit of a pain on the root filesystem.

Using LVM, you can span filesystems over the internal HD and the memory card, or any other drives for that matter. One caveat: If you remove or otherwise lose the memory card after spanning the root filesystem, your system will not boot. I'd strongly recommend backups after doing this; a backup before doing it wouldn't hurt, either.

[swisscelt]

One correction: I think I implied that you just need to wipe clean the memory card. You actually would need to install LVM on both the memory card AND the internal HD. Apologies if that wasn't clear...

[dreamatdrew]

I know this isn't the question you asked but update manager keeps the package it downloads. So you MIGHT want to clear out the cache of downloaded updates (They're kinda superfluous once they're installed.) The command to do that is

sudo apt-get clean

[alexseanchai]

Does not seem to have worked. *sad*

[vlion]

This is due to the apt-get configuration.

Looking over the apt-get manual (this is what runs under update manager), I found these entries.

/var/cache/apt/archives/
Storage area for retrieved package files. Configuration Item:
Dir::Cache::Archives.

/var/cache/apt/archives/partial/
Storage area for package files in transit. Configuration Item:
Dir::Cache::Archives (implicit partial).

So you need to dink with the configuration of those items (and stare at teh manual a lot) to make it redirect.

[alexseanchai]

How do I do that?

[vlion]

Abstractly, you'll dig up the apt-get configuration files and edit them to whereever the mount point of your 16gig drive is.

Concretely, I haven't the faintest of where those files are (likely under /etc/apt-get/ or similar), and what syntax to use.

'man apt-get' on Google. Allocate an hour or so of insulting man page authors for figuring this out.

[alexseanchai]

Thanks