[nmglug] Now I did it! Edition2

[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 utilityKdirStat 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).
Mozilla suite starts fine, yet 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!

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 -hah!

So I've got 2 remote drives of 200GB, and a partitioned hd on my
notebookwith 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. 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.

thanks for reading this tome and I appreciate all responses!