The other day one of my Debian systems locked up, due to the root / partition
being filled up. Kind of a “same problem, different distro” scenario as a few
years back I ran into the same dilemma on Arch Linux
At some point, I’ll probably bite the bullet and scale down my /home
partition and give the root / partition a bit more breathing room, but until
then, the quick fix is to simply clear out the apt cache.
To do so, all you need to run is the following:
apt clean # Requires super user privileges
While this didn’t have a huge impact, freeing up roughly 10% of the root
partition’s disk space, it was enough to go from not working, back to working.
Keep in mind, after running this, I did need to reboot before things started to
work as expected.
While it didn’t apply to me, since I do this regularly anyway, a bonus command
you could run is apt autoremove, which also requires super user privileges,
that will take care of anything that was previously installed that is no longer
necessary.
