Last night I was trying to install mysql on my Arch Linux netbook. Now, this would not be note worthy but for the fact it was going badly. The post-install of the pkg .install script is supposed to do basic set-up so you’re ready to go out of the box. However, it failed with a disk full error.

Hmmm. The netbook has at least a 300Gb disk, would an Arch install really fill that? So, I ran

df -k

And, yes, it showed 0 free space.

Weird. But pacman checks for free space when it installs a package, so when I installed mysql the packaged files miraculously fitted in and used up the remaining space? That seems unlikely.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the package several times (it was late) and when I kept getting the same error. Not exactly the most efficient troubleshooting (it was late). My main instinct was to jump on the forums for help and to tacitly “blame the devs”. Instead I decided to call it a night (it was late).

So, this morning I thought “what can I do to quickly free up some space and check remaining space again?”

pacman -Sc
df -h

…ok, so my disk was full!

du /var

Not much

du /usr

Again, just a few gigs. Paranoia sets in.

du /

Whole thing is less than 5 gigs.

By this point I am suspecting it is something to do with my LVM setup and I head off to work with the intention of investigating on the train.

A small amount of reading and one command later

lvs

I can see that, for a reason I can’t rememeber, I made my root volume 5G. Maybe I didn’t understand what I was doing when I set up or maybe it seemed like enough at the time.

At least I know how to resize it now too!