Q Virtually full disk
I have a fairly old version of Linux Mint Xfce installed in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The size of the virtual disk is roughly 20GB and now 18GB has been taken up. How can I find big packages so I can see whether they have been used, and remove them as needed?
Cameron Wright
A Are you running out of space on the virtual disk or on the physical disk holding it? VirtualBox creates dynamically sized virtual disks by default. This means that if you create a 20GB disk and load 10GB of data on to it, the virtual disk file is only about 10GB in size. As you add to it, the file grows, but bear in mind that if you remove data from the virtual disk, the file does not shrink. So, a size of 18GB only means it has held that much data at some time. If you delete, say, 5GB, the file is still 18GB even though it only holds 13GB. That space is not lost, though, as it is used as you add further data. So, the first step is to check how much is actually in use by running $ df -h / in a terminal within the virtual machine.
If it is significantly less than the 18GB taken up by the disk file, you can resize the virtual disk file to reclaim the unused space, but it will subsequently grow as you write to theDo this while the VM is not running. When you start it up, the extra space is not available to you until you open the partition manager or and resize the root partition.
