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I am new to Linux, so this is probably a basic problem...

My flash drive is only 4GB in size and that is not enough to hold kernel and other package updates, even if only temporary. I am actually using Kubuntu, but I don't think this would change the nature of the question...?

I would just like to be able to set my download directory to the internal drive to download the upgrades, then replace the old versions installed on the USB. Of course I have no use for keeping the older versions, so would I also have to manually remove those after upgrading?

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I'm guessing a bit here but...

Ubuntu downloads the packages it is installing to /var/cache/apt/archives

You could move the directory to your internal hard disk then create a link to that directory.

This should work.

A fairly new Ubuntu install is 2.7GB. I would move my data to the internal disk and the remaining 1GB or so should last you a reasonable length of time before running out of space. Ubuntu should clean up after itself, and get rid of the download when the package has been installed, so it will be additional programs that causes you problems, not updates.

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    I think this would be the best way to go about it. Assuming your external is mounted to /media/external, you would create a directory called 'archives' on the external, move all files from /var/cache/apt/archives to /media/external/archives. Next, remove the archives directory with sudo rm -rf /var/cache/apt/archives BE VERY CAREFUL when you type that command, sudo rm is very dangerous. To create the link, simply use sudo ln -s /media/external/archives /var/cache/apt/archives. To revert, do sudo unlink /var/cache/apt/archives, recreate the folder, and copy back the files.
    – stillinbeta
    Commented May 20, 2010 at 22:58
  • I don't guess there's a GUI app out there that can help me do this, huh? I'm not confident with my syntax just yet.
    – NoCatharsis
    Commented May 21, 2010 at 6:58

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