Village_RC2 : Openbox community spin

[djohnston]

patrick013,

When you are at the forum login screen, there are two places where you can click the login (Identifiez-vous) button. Should look like the screenshot below:



Below the password field in the center of the screen is the field for the number of minutes to stay logged in. Mine shows 60. What does yours show? Below the number of minutes is a checkmark box. Checking that should keep you logged in indefinitely (Toujours connecté).

You can also login in the upper left corner of the screen. In the dropdown menu to the right of the password field, selecting Toujours should also keep you logged in indefinitely.

[OnlyHuman]

Hi I downloaded an gave the RC2 iso a very quick spin in vbox on my i7, unfortunately when I plugged my usb pendrive in and enabled in vbox the mouse froze and everything else, only option was to press off button or pull plug out, just thought mention it, maybe I am alone with this problem an just my pc, but as I use vbox alot its important to me that iso's work well in vbox. Good luck with  improving the iso, it looked quite nice.
Best wishes,
OnlyHuman

[Taco.22]

Hi OnlyHuman,

Could you please give VillageLinux a try in the same way.  One of things djohnston did with it was to add the virtualbox-guest-dkms package and all dependencies in order to get a fully working implementation for a VBox guest.  The next version of Scorpio will come out on that base shortly.

[Taco.22]

LinuxVillage now has Gparted recognising the following file systems - btrfs; ext2, 3, 4; fat16, 32; hfs, hfs+; jfs; linux-swap; nilfs2; ntfs; reiser4; reiserfs; xfs.  Should cover most things!!  Upload will take place soon.

[Taco.22]

I went poking around in the bowels of /var and discovered it contains 274mb of stuff!!  Of that I then found that /var/lib was 202mb, and that /var/lib/apt was 142mb of that.  There are a number of text files in /var/lib/apt/lists that constitute that.  I found /var/lib/dpkg/info held 18mb of files; /var/lib/dkms/virtualbox-guest held 15mb.

I looked at /var/cache - it was 69mb with /var/cache/apt at 39mb and /var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree at 13mb. 

How much of this can I clean out without borking the system.  Seems to be a lot of stuff just sitting around!

[djohnston]

I'm pretty sure, but not 100%, that /var/cache files can be deleted. Lemme do some research on that. Before you delete any file, you can see what application uses it with:

lsof name_of_file_to_be_deleted

I've been wondering where the disk space is going!

EDIT: It just occured to me you might want to do the apt cleanup routine.

apt-get clean
apt-get autoclean

See if that frees any space in /var/cache. You can also get rid of "old" files. I found over a dozen.

updatedb
locate .old

Then rm them one at a time.

[djohnston]

Well, the "clean" routine did nothing.

[root@DebWeb ~]# du -hs /var
225M   /var
[root@DebWeb ~]# apt-get clean
[root@DebWeb ~]# apt-get autoclean
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
[root@DebWeb ~]# du -hs /var
225M   /var
[root@DebWeb ~]#

[djohnston]

Too many /var subdirectories to document. Look at the Linux Documentation Project page for /var for the full descriptions.

Use lsof name_of_file_to_be_deleted for any you're unsure of.

[OnlyHuman]

Hi, I installed the RC2 iso this time, ( can't say I like the installer much, but suppose you get used to it) after the install and reboot at grub I have an error 15.
I will try again when a new iso comes out.
Best wishes,
OnlyHuman

[melodie]

Hello,

About cleaning please try Bleachbit root (even if you want to remove it after along with it's depends). Later I'll do a few shots for you related to the parts in Synaptic to show you what I said about a few days ago : the cleaning of leftover files.

About /var : you can't do much in there because lots of essential parts for the system live there. What I hope to do is perhaps, help you to clean more in a clean way.

[djohnston]

There are some you can clean out. From the Linux Documentation Project page for /var:

/var/cache

    Is intended for cached data from applications. Such data is locally generated as a result of time-consuming I/O or calculation. This data can generally be regenerated or be restored. Unlike /var/spool, files here can be deleted without data loss. This data remains valid between invocations of the application and rebooting of the system. The existence of a separate directory for cached data allows system administrators to set different disk and backup policies from other directories in /var.

/var/log

    Log files from the system and various programs/services, especially login (/var/log/wtmp, which logs all logins and logouts into the system) and syslog (/var/log/messages, where all kernel and system program message are usually stored). Files in /var/log can often grow indefinitely, and may require cleaning at regular intervals. Something that is now normally managed via log rotation utilities such as 'logrotate'. This utility also allows for the automatic rotation compression, removal and mailing of log files. Logrotate can be set to handle a log file daily, weekly, monthly or when the log file gets to a certain size. Normally, logrotate runs as a daily cron job. This is a good place to start troubleshooting general technical problems.

(See the documentation for some specific files in /var/log directory.)

/var/mail

    Contains user mailbox files. The mail files take the form /var/mail/'username' (Note that /var/mail may be a symbolic link to another directory). User mailbox files in this location are stored in the standard UNIX mailbox format. The reason for the location of this directory was to bring the FHS inline with nearly every UNIX implementation (it was previously located in /var/spool/mail). This change is important for inter-operability since a single /var/mail is often shared between multiple hosts and multiple UNIX implementations (despite NFS locking issues).

[Taco.22]

I've done lots of apt-get clean, autoremove and Bleachbit.  These files seem to be optional from the removal point of view.  Took an experimental dive into the /var folder.

Well there is a guaranteed 40+mb in /var/cache/apt, and that are two apt-get files.  The rest of /var/cache was removed and no ill effects so far.  Obviously there are files that build up over time - just don't need the clutter on a live install build.

Did the same for /var/lib - removed contents of apt, dpkg and aptitude.  On reboot I did "apt-get update" and /var/lib/apt was back to 75mb. 

The end result is that the system generates these files and there is nothing you can do about it.  However they can be removed for the purposes of remastering to make the build smaller, and they will regenerate on install the moment you invoke apt-get.  Well, at least it gets the build size down.

@OnlyHuman - error 15 sounds like a grub issue.  You're using VBox?  Make sure that grub is configured on install and put to the right partition.  I haven't tried an install on to VBox yet - I have found it much easier to use multiple partitions on a separate test rig - haven't encountered an error there yet.   

[patrick013]

Somewhere there's a config file stating the max size for files in /var

Wish I could remember where.   I deleted 4GB of debug logs and
changed the thing to 2GB max.    But where ?     Can't emember.

Just FYI

[melodie]

Hi,
You start with saying /var contains 225 MB (about that much) and end removing /var/cache files which are about 40 MB: ok it does not harm the system, but by doing that the remastered product can't be used for demonstrating the content of the repositories : try to start Synaptic in a spin made this way you will probably find it empty and will have to reload Synaptic to get it filled again. The files under /var/lib might be of the same kind.

Patrick : probably in some file under /etc ? Could it be in sysctl.conf perhaps ?

[Taco.22]

You start with saying /var contains 225 MB (about that much) and end removing /var/cache files which are about 40 MB: ok it does not harm the system, but by doing that the remastered product can't be used for demonstrating the content of the repositories : try to start Synaptic in a spin made this way you will probably find it empty and will have to reload Synaptic to get it filled again. The files under /var/lib might be of the same kind.

What I have found is that on a new install apt-get can't do anything unless you first do "apt-get update".  So whether the files are there in /var/cache or not doesn't seem to mean anything.  Besides, it's not a 40mb saving - it's almost 200mb on the live cd.  The same with /var/lib - again a saving of over 100mb on the live cd.  So all up there could be about 300mb of space saved on a live cd , of which about 120mb is put back on doing "apt-get update" after installing the system.