Dist-upgrade takes ages and fills SD

[shooftie]

I am a designer/developer and semi-convert to Linux. I have used Ubuntu up until this point and so am finding some of the Pi's quirks a little tricky to understand.

I ran "$ sudo apt-get update" followed by "$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" recently and was confused by the result.

Firstly, it seemed to be retrieving an inordinate amount from "...wolfram-engine armhf...", 219MB at a time. I finally called it a day at "get 689".

When I rebooted my Pi and tried again I got to "Get:78 http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ wheezy/main raspberrypi-bootloader armhf 1.20140618-1 [19.2 MB]", the process failed and said that I had run out of space on my 8GB SD.

Obviously I have missed something here... Could anyone suggest what and where to go from here?

[Paul Webster]

For the last part (device becoming full) ... did you expand the file system to make it use the full amount of remaining space on the SD card after copying the original image?

[klricks]

Sounds like you had a really old OS image and you forgot to expand filesystem to fill card before doing anything else.
If you are running the 'raw' image Raspbian then re run the config utility:
sudo raspi-config
Find the expand filesystem in the menu and then reboot.
If that does not fix it then your image is likely trashed and you will have to re-image the OS onto the SD card.

If you install NOOBS then the expanding is automatically done for you.

[rpdom]

You can see how much space you have used and allocated with "df -h /"

If apt-get looks like it's going to do any big updates I try to break it down into smaller steps where possible.

First I run "apt-get clean", which will delete any old install downloads to free up space. They're not needed once the install has completed.

Then I run "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get upgrade". This will download and install some software.

Then I run "apt-get clean" again to get rid of the install files from that software.

Finally I run "apt-get dist-upgrade" to install the remainder of the software.

If I get really tight on space I will manually download and install the upgrades in sequence using wget and dpkg, but that is not a method I would recommend for most situations.

[AndrewS]

If I get really tight on space I will manually download and install the upgrades in sequence using wget and dpkg, but that is not a method I would recommend for most situations.

You can also upgrade just single packages with "apt-get install somepackage" - no need to go as low level as dpkg

[shooftie]

There was not one post there which didn't answer a question or highlight my oversight...

I hadn't expanded the file system, which I have done now.

I cleaned up the card after the mammoth upgrade which brought me here.

I ran apt-get update followed by apt-get upgrade followed by apt-get dist-upgrade...

All went smoothly and now I have an up-to-date Pi...

Many thanks... Windows has obviously spoiled me!