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I was installing LibreOffice on my Ubuntu phone when it ran out of space (sudo apt-get install libreoffice). When I attempt to purge what was installed of LibreOffice (sudo apt-get purge libreoffice), I am presented with the message

E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.

When I run sudo dpkg --configure -a, I am presented with the following error:

dpkg: error: failed to write status database record about 'iputils-ping' to '/var/lib/dpkg/status': No space left on device

How should I proceed? I am trying to purge LibreOffice precisely to address this lack of space. Are there some LibreOffice package/system files I can remove manually to make enough space for the dpkg purge to actually run?

d3pd
  • 3,791

1 Answers1

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I have face this out of space issues several times. This is how i solve it. Usually apt-get create some cache which holds some space on the computer. So I clean the cache, then I get some space back for the system to use to run other other process. This is the reason I don't regularly clean cache. So this is my trick

$ sudo apt-get clean; sudo apt-get autoclean

You can then purge libreoffice afterwards.

PS: When you are faced with space issue you can try clean out old kernels as well with sudo apt-get autoremove --purge -y

saviour123
  • 524