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When doing a release upgrade I get the error:

The upgrade has aborted. The upgrade needs a total of 1,279 M free space on disk '/'.

I used to solve this problem by moving the /var/cache/apt directory to my home partition (which has plenty of space), and then making a symlink to it:

sudo mv /var/cache/apt ~/.
sudo ln -s ~/apt /var/cache/apt

This worked up till 16.04. It appears to no longer work in 16.10.

Does anybody know a way to get around this disk space issue without installing from a USB key or uninstalling packages?

krumpelstiltskin
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1 Answers1

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Update after OPs comment

If moving /var/cache/apt to home doesn't help, check that your home partition has enough space. You can also try removing the extra icon themes you installed. A few icon themes can easily eat upto 1GB+ space these days.

Another option is removing older kernels you're not using. Use this question as a help How do I remove old kernel versions to clean up the boot menu?

/etc/apt is not too big a folder to gain you significant improvement on the disk size. On the other hand, You can try moving the /var/cache/apt folder instead to your home and symlinking it, because that one is used to download all those .deb files.

Using your same commands before, you can do this 

sudo mv /var/cache/apt ~/.
sudo ln -s ~/apt /var/cache/apt

Of course, You need to remove the folder /var/cache/apt first after mv-ing.

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Anwar
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