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I tried to install steam and ubuntu told me I only had a few megs left. but my partition says it has 30gb free.

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5       6.9G  6.3G  236M  97% /
none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev            1.9G   12K  1.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs           396M  1.2M  395M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            2.0G   89M  1.9G   5% /run/shm
none            100M   52K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sdb1       138G  130G  8.7G  94% /media/randy/New Volume
/dev/sda1        75G   48G   27G  64% /media/randy/F440B04040B00B7E
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  • can you append the output of df -h to your question please?
    – Charles Green
    Sep 10, 2014 at 0:34
  • Your root partition says it has 236MB left, not 30GB
    – Jon Hanna
    Sep 10, 2014 at 1:35

2 Answers 2

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Note these lines:

/dev/sdb5       6.9G  6.3G  236M  97% /
/dev/sdb1       138G  130G  8.7G  94% /media/randy/New Volume
/dev/sda1        75G   48G   27G  64% /media/randy/F440B04040B00B7E

The first line is important. That shows how much space your Ubuntu installation has in its root partition. As you can see, it has very little (not that it had much to begin with). That you have 30G free elsewhere (in /media/randy/F440B04040B00B7E - an NTFS partition, by the looks of it) doesn't help Ubuntu all that much.

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A certain amount of disk space will be reserved for the: root user so that that user will always be able to function even if regular users are erroring because of no space. A secondary reason for the reservation is that the file-system itself requires a certain amount of free space to operate correctly. This is related to why Linux file-systems do not need to be defragmented and Windows file-systems do. The way the files are laid out on Linux systems means that fragmenting: does not occur as long as there is a certain amount of free space.

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  • That was very informative. but it didn't really help me figure out why I can't install steam.
    – Syi Kargath
    Sep 10, 2014 at 1:12
  • It answered your question. You are out of space for regular users. See the first link, it mentions the command to unreserve that space: tune2fs. However, if you persist in making the system do what you want instead of what it should you ARE going to cause issues for yourself later. Your choice.
    – headkase
    Sep 10, 2014 at 1:14
  • then if I should not be doing that why would you tell me to?
    – Syi Kargath
    Sep 10, 2014 at 1:21
  • I said that it is possible to unreserve that space but that it is a bad idea. A better idea is to uninstall something you don't use or even better install a bigger disk. The tune2fs command is for advanced users. If you know what you are doing you can override file-system parameters because you know the consequences. Since you didn't even know about the command it probably isn't a good idea for yourself. Regardless, in a terminal type man tune2fs to read about it. You can make it so that only 5GB is reserved, instead of 30GB, and that should still be fine.
    – headkase
    Sep 10, 2014 at 1:25
  • But, then, still, when you go to install Steam games you are still going to need space. Unless you are using Steam In-Home Streaming to stream them from another Windows machine on the same network.
    – headkase
    Sep 10, 2014 at 1:26

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