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I have installed Ubuntu 11.04 on my Thinkpad X300 which is having 64 GB solid state drive. When I used the df command to learn about the free space, I noticed that there is a mount point /var/lock which is having around 2 GB space as shown below. Is it really needed? I would like to use that space also. How to use that? Please let me know.

$ df -k 
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             57485580  21128280  33437160  39% /
none                   2012364       704   2011660   1% /dev
none                   2021604       296   2021308   1% /dev/shm
none                   2021604        96   2021508   1% /var/run
none                   2021604         0   2021604   0% /var/lock
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/var/lock (and others such as /var/run and /dev/shm) are filesystems that are actually stored in system RAM. There's no need to "recover" the space, and it's rather ineffective to use it for yourself. It's used so that system locks and other tasks can run and be used efficiently.

Don't worry about how much space it claims is available, just look at the Used column for information on how it's actually being used. In your case, none of /var/lock is being used at all, but there's a little bit used for /dev/shm and /var/run. Nothing to worry about, just the system operating normally.

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    Maybe add why it's 2 GB (tmpfs default is half the RAM size)?
    – htorque
    Jun 3, 2011 at 7:03

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