As previously mentioned my Xubuntu install was suffering from some serious issues, so this afternoon I created a USB install disk and did a reinstall but dual booted a new fresh install with the old one.
This seems to have done the trick a nice stable installation.
The dual boot was for copying my old /home/user to the new /home/user data across, this for the most part kept ALL my settings, loading up thunderbird meant that it restored my settings. So I now have a dual boot system, with my old install being reduced to 90 GB, which is great as I can use that for something else, testing another distro for example.
Note
1. /home/user is just an example,
2. Keeping the same user name avoids issues with file / user / group permissions
Now that I have a much more stable system I an hopefully do some useful testing and development, get back to the torios stuff for example.
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 145G 25G 113G 19% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev 872M 4.0K 872M 1% /dev
tmpfs 177M 1.2M 175M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 881M 216K 881M 1% /run/shm
none 100M 36K 100M 1% /run/userHard disk usage (includes user files), actual OS footprint is much lower.
~$ free -h
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1.7G 1.6G 140M 13M 36M 949M
-/+ buffers/cache: 634M 1.1G
Swap: 1.7G 504K 1.7G
:~$Memory usage seems a bit high !!!,
Closing thunderbird seems to free up RAM
h total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1.7G 1.5G 230M 13M 36M 950M
-/+ buffers/cache: 545M 1.2G
Swap: 1.7G 504K 1.7G
psutton@ER1401:~$Further investigation should help
Run top to see what is actually running. I will investigate and see how much memory I can actually free up.