Hmm… chrome won’t start:

$ google-chrome-stable
yada yada Invalid url pattern: chrome://print/*

I wonder if my disk is full?

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2        30G   29G     0 100% /
tmpfs           2.8G  8.0K  2.8G   1% /tmp
/dev/sda4       421G  346G   54G  87% /home

Oh. My root is full, that’ll do it. Better do some tidying to free up disk space.

Remove Unused Packages (Orphans)

To recursively remove orphans and their configuration files use:

# pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq)

This removes all packages which are no longer used as a dependency as well as their config files. As with anything that’s recursive, proceed with caution, though you should be fine.

Cleaning the package cache

# pacman -Sc

Once in a while you will need to run this to clean out old or uninstalled packages that where downloaded by pacman during installation. Pacman doesn’t clean this automatically so it can grow indefinitely, which in my case is what took up the majority of the space.

The disadvantage of using this is that you cannot downgrade later, so only use it if you are certain previous package versions are not required.

Conclusion

Let’s see if that helped:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2        30G   11G   17G  40% /
tmpfs           2.8G  8.0K  2.8G   1% /tmp
/dev/sda4       421G  346G   54G  87% /home

I gained 18GB, impressive.

Hopefully this helps someone else out. If you have any questions or just want to say hey, you can find my social doots at the bottom of the page.


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