clearing disk space in CLI?

[sylvaine]

Whilst trying to get my GUI back, I got the error message "Keyboard initialisation failed. This could be a missing or incorrect setup of xkeyboard-config.", which google tells me means I need to free up disk space.

As far as I know, I need to use the rm command to do this, but how do I figure out which files to delete without my GUI? I'm deathly afraid that I'll delete something I need.

(Please bear in mind that I'm an utter noob when it comes to Linux.)

Comments

[pixel]

You can pretty safely delete things (like music or pictures) in your home directory or directories inside your home directory, I wouldn't recommend deleting things not in your home directory, that is where you should land when you log into the cli. It'll be something like: /home/username

pwd : print working (current) directory
cd Documents : change directory to Documents
cd .. : go 'up' a directory
ls : list contents of current directory, to find files
rm file.txt : delete file

Once you've got some room to get the gui booted, one thing I've done that clears up some space is removing old kernels, google it for your distro and find a pile of instructions :)

[sylvaine]

Thanks for the input! Deleting files on home didn't have any effect, unfortunately, the problem seems to be with the root itself, which I'd rather get IRL help with.