[nmglug] Now I did it!

[BrianO'Keefe]

I'm hoping that someone(s) can help me here. I have had a constant issue
with vanishing disk space on my Ubuntu partition (dual boots with OS X
on a TiBook ppc). I have stopped keeping any media files on my hard
drive and have transfered them all to a remote usb drive (another
issue). Yet my disk space keeps dwindling a few hundred MBs at a time
until I was down to less than to 2 GB. I stumbled across the utility
KdirStat which is a gui and utility like du in that it shows disk usage
but also can delete or modify files right in the gui-a nice option. I
read the how-to and one suggestion was to use the option of "make clean"
by right clicking on a build directory  for installed packages built
from source and the build files would be deleted saving some space. I
have quite a few of these like Sunbird (the mozilla directory, a total
PITA to install and I haven't had success reinstalling it), Mplayer,
Gnash, etc and as I had deleted or moved everything I could think of
this seemed like a good option. I right clicked and chose "make clean"
for those directories, all in my home folder (probably not a good place
to build packages, but I'm still learning). Of course, now these
packages don't work at all anymore . Sunbird is a bust and though I
still have my calendar files in ~/.mozilla they don't all show up when
imported into Evolution, which I do not want to use as it kept freezing
when it made too many copies of log files with weird extensions (never
did figure that out except to force quit, delete the log files and
restart the app) and though Mozilla suite starts fine, when I tried to
import the .ics file into the Moz-calendar, it loaded and then crashed
the app. Mozsuite still starts but crashes immediately upon trying to
import the .ics file. This was my fall back option, to use Moz-suite
instead of Sunbird and Thunderbird. Thunderbird is fine as I didn't run
"make clean" on that directory, thank the pc gods!
Mplayer plays but without sound. I built the version I use from source
for better performance playing wmv and flash video as the Ubuntu version
didn't work well.
I downloaded an rpm for ppc and installed an alien produced deb for
Sunbird into /usr/bin. It won't start and I get an error that the
mozilla runtime library could not be found.
The big picture here is that I would like to sort all of this out but I
would also like to rework my entire partition setup and lose some of the
OS X partition after a thorough backup. I have a firewire drive with an
archive of OS X stuff but for some reason I can't read it from OS X but
I can from Ubuntu though I can't access the data as it shows up
corrupted. This firewire drive has gotten almost no use since the backup
and 2 other partitions on it are fine. It just sits on my desk for
emergencies.
so I've got 2 remote drives of 200GB, a partitioned hd on my notebook
with a 40 GB OS X part with 6GB remaining and an Ubuntu part of 15GB
with 2GB remaining. I have all kinds of user installed software on both
partitions and in the case of the Ubuntu one I've installed stuff all
over the place and some is broken. I need someone(s) to help me figure
out how to clean this up,have a functioning tho smaller OS X partition
that I can use Mac-on-Linux for in Ubuntu and an upgrade to Feisty Fawn
on the Ubuntu part. A side note is that the release candidate for Feisty
works great on ppc but the unofficial stable release, the only available
one, does not due to some bad code. I want to have, keep or recreate the
software that I've added and that will need some serious sorting out. I
would be happy to have a meeting at the SFBC to discuss this with any
and all who might help and would pay a consulting fee if we came up with
something that might work. I've thought of cloning the whole mess to a
remote drive, getting a larger hard drive for my TiBook, and cloning
back onto the new drive. Maybe a new laptop, x86, as the ppc Ubuntu is
no longer "official". Much to ponder.
tnaks for reading this tome and I appreciate all responses!