Swap file for live session

General Help
21

Puhh, that worked, thanks!
'sudo swapoff' showed an error, but with 'sudo swapoff -a' it worked and then I removed the swapfile with the terminal.

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22

Okay, today I created the swap file in the root directory of my mounted LinuxMint drive.
It seems to work a litte bit, this is the terminal output:

Screenshot from 2026-02-21 07-17-42
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I was able to install firefox as snap package and also installed 3 flatpaks (gear lever, flatseal, pantheon-tweaks). It seems to me to be more than what was possible without a swapfile.
But when I now try to install a further flatpak (pinta), there is shown that there is not enough space left.
I don´t understand that because in the Swap are 3,6 GiB shown as free.
Are the around 4,8 GiB free RAM needed to run Gnome or why aren´t they available to install a bigger package with ~1 GiB (small .deb packages can still be installed)

Screenshot from 2026-02-21 07-31-33
Screenshot from 2026-02-21 07-31-33886×590 58.6 KB

23

How much Space does Your USB Stick have?

24

The USB stick has 64 GiB.

25

Can you share output of lsblk -f from the live environment.

26

I had first to start a live session, so took a bit time. I created the swap file and installed krita as flatpak and firefox as snap. Now, when I try to install OBS studio, I get the message that only 373 MB are available and the app can´t be installed.

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I should have free space, but I don´t have:

Bildschirmfoto vom 2026-02-23 15-56-27

28

Flatpaks installed generally installed under /var/lib/flatpak/... under /

Here /rofs acts as your / , for which FSAVIL showing 0, I'm not 100% sure but this is my guess why flatpak installation failed.

Can you check again with this:

df -h
29

Bildschirmfoto vom 2026-02-25 16-21-15
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I also get an error when I try to install OBS studio as apt package.
Because I noticed that I had only 6 GiB on my LinuxMint partition /dev/sda5 space left, I cleaned my Downloads folder today (the downloaded .iso files filled the drive). So this should not be the problem. Do you think a swap partition instead of a swap file could help?

30

Look at your /cow which acts as / in the live environment. / is used upto 88% and only 488MB available. Any installation higher than that will likely to fail.

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31

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