Ubuntu again...

[JunkMale]

Can anyone point a 1,000,000 lumens light on what could be the issue here...

Hard disk of 72Gigbytes partitioned in to 2 partitions, one resized down to 42 Gigs to hold the former XP that has failed and the other 30 Gig partition for Ubuntu and its swap space.

The swap space is 2 Gigabytes leaving me with 28 Gigs of space to play with.

According the the file manager, I have 1.6 Gigs of free space and the amount of space for the Ububtu drive is 9.4 Gigs...

Where did the other 18 Gigs go to?????

Any tools that can help me find out what or where or if any temp files are eating in to the drive space as I have noticed that Ubuntu is running at a crawl and its a P4 intel 2.66 Ghz job and *nix ran like butter off a hot knife when it was first installed and now, snails pace.

[JunkMale]

I have found the culprit.

Audacity audio editor.

It has now chewed another 100MB off my drive space after trying it out twice on two different MP3's. I rebooted and sure enough, the space is being eaten up by it.

Any pointers where I can find the Audacity tmp files? other than asking in the Audacity site which I have and I am still waiting for a reply on...

[Jick]

Have you checked in the /tmp/ dir? Or even, the /tmp/audacity/ dir? Apparently that is where Audacity stores its runtime temp files. Usually, when Audacity is running correctly, those temp files will be deleted on exit. However, it seems that Audacity will leave files there if it crashes in order to recover things the next time you run it.

So, as long as you didn't lose anything critical when/if it crashed, you should be safe to delete any files it puts there.

[JunkMale]

Yep, looked for audacity paths and .au .aup extensions and nothing.

I have just made 3 Gigs of additional space by moving all my personal stuff to another drive. I don't know how much more of my junk is littering the system but I know its not more than a few Gigs, about 5 Gigs worth or at a push it would fit on a DVD if I sacrificed some data. So the issue is not an accumulation of smaller files eating space as someone suggested despite pointing out the fact that before and after use of audacity, the loss in space is permanent.

I think I will attempt something dangerous like upgrade, see if that solves the problem... Any words of wisdom before I do? apart from the obvious "Back everything up" one.

[Jick]

Other than backing up, I would suggest you do a clean install. Sometimes upgrading can cause problems of its own. Also problems from before the upgrade can still transfer over to the upgrade. But, you can try the upgrading route first. It does work sometimes. But, if you run into any issues a fresh install can help sometimes. :)

[JunkMale]

OK, good point.

I downloaded the latest Ubuntu 9.10 release when it came out, so I will put that on the drive at some point in the next week or three I have another PC to try it on first, see what, if any issues exist.

[Stephen Philbin]

Doesn't Ubuntu have a "Find Files" option in the desktop menu? Just try to create a situation where you know the culprit will eat up some more disk space and then do a find files with the filter set to all files with any name but created between a few seconds before and after the space was eaten. So if it's playing an MP3 that makes disk space get eaten, prepare a find files with parameters set to find files made in the last 10 seconds and then hit the play button on an MP3 5 seconds before starting the search. It'll probably take a while for the search to complete, but you should at least be able to find where all the crap is being stored.

[opifex]

You might find a disk map useful to find out where the "bloat" is hidden. GdMap is pretty good and you can install it directly from the repository with your package manager.