Increase the space of your computer for Ubuntu 18.04 with these little tricks

Image of a traditional hard drive.

Later this week the new version of Ubuntu LTS will be released, a version called Ubuntu 18.04. This new version will be received by many users, both those who use Ubuntu LTS and users who use the normal version of Ubuntu, that is, the current Ubuntu 17.10. But to many users, The change will cause them several problems, many of them due to the space or internal storage of the computer. The installation and various updates gradually fill up the hard drive but that is something that can be solved with these little tricks, some of which are already known to many of you.

Clear APT cache

The APT manager usually has a hard disk space to store the packages that it downloads and then install. It may happen that the packages are obsolete because there is a more recent version and we also have it installed in Ubuntu. To calculate the space that APT occupies we have to write the following in the terminal:

sudo du -sh /var/cache/apt

And it will show us the megabytes that the packages use. If it is very crowded, we empty it with the following command:

sudo apt-get autoclean

Clean up created images

Ubuntu and Nautilus usually create previews of images and some files like PDF or videos. These previews usually take up space that can be freed up, especially if the file it refers to is already deleted or deleted. First we have to know what space they occupy, for this we write the following in the terminal:

du -sh ~/.cache/thumbnails

And if it is a lot of space, we clean it with the following command:

rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/*

Remove orphaned packages

If we are very active users and we like to experiment with the software, possibly we have orphaned packages that take up a lot of space. To clean these packages we will use a tool called gtkorphan, similar to the deborphan tool. To install this tool we have to write the following:

sudo apt-get install gtkorphan

Once installed we have to search with it for the orphaned packages and eliminate them.

Conclusion

Performing these tasks we will possibly obtain 1 Gb or more of space on our hard drives, quite useful for the update manager to download the necessary packages and install the new version of Ubuntu. And do not forget that These tasks must also be performed once we have updated to the new Ubuntu 18.04.


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  1.   Jorge Ariel Utello said

    Repositories are always a pain…. Head, finally LTS!