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When I made my main PC a dual boot Windwoes XP and Lubuntu, little did I realise that my hard disk was going to run out of inodes…
On researching this ‘issue’ [we don’t call them problems any more], I found that lubuntu or ubuntu keeps updating the kernel. Whilst not removing the old ones. Auto remove [in apt-get] does not flush the old ones. So gradually I had used up all my inodes. This became apparent when I tried to install some new software. It also ran out of disk space.
So when I had a message telling me I had an ‘issue’ with an update/upgrade with disk space, I checked using ‘df’. Nope someone wasn’t telling the whole truth. Df said I had a few Gigabytes to play with. So what was wrong?
[Use df -i to show inodes]
More research said that I should remove the old kernels, thus freeing up the inodes. Well I did and we went back to the happy situation. For a while. Maybe two months…
Some months ago I had removed [with extreme prejudice] Windwoes XP. I no longer touched/rebooted into XP. I did not need the XP taking up space on my boot drive. So I made it an ext4 drive and used it for downloading storage. In previous years as drives got bigger and bigger, it was necessary to re-install Windwoes to a newer larger drive. This could take days of transferring settings ensuring all the little things like country got set correctly. In one case I forgot to set the country to South Africa, all the Office settings of course used US spelling! This needed a re-install.
Now for the good part. I backed up my home directory [folder in Windwoes] and my spare part [downloads]. Commence install of lubuntu 15.10…on a whole disk not a partitioned one of 30GB each.
A couple of hours later, I restored my backups to the wide open space on the same disk. When I run df -i now I get loads of inodes. No ‘issues’ and hair pulling.
I should tell you that the disk drive is a Samsung solid state 60GB disk. Which has performed for several years superbly. It really sped up Windwoes, booting in 4 to 5 seconds. Unfortunately the speed was beaten by an identical PC running Ubuntu!
Now I am happy to boot into lubuntu in a matter of about 3 seconds. But I cannot take a sip of coffee between switching on and logging in!