[YLUG] can't free up enough space to upgrade Ubuntu

[nigel white]

Hi

In spite of removing all my documents and ending up with 40.8GB of
available space (according to Disk Usage Analyser) I cannot get Ubuntu
to upgrade. I get "upgrade needs 2002M free on disk /. Free an
additional 436M on /". Every time I free up more space on / this request
changes, but only by small amounts ie 516M > 390M > 363M > 436M. I keep
freeing more space, but sometimes the requested space actually
increases!

I have done several previous Ubuntu upgrades with no problems.

df -h gets (but I don't understand what this means)
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2       9.3G  7.3G  1.6G  83% /
udev            494M  4.0K  494M   1% /dev
tmpfs           201M  1.2M  200M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            501M  196K  501M   1% /run/shm
/dev/sda4        40G  4.1G   34G  11% /home

I'm trying to upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 12.10 because Ubuntu
keeps freezing. Nothing works except the mouse moves. The only thing it
responds to is holding down the on/off button. Sporadic problem. I have
no idea what's triggering it.

According to Disk Usage Analyser my total capacity is 52.9GB. Used is
12.1GB and / is 11.5GB.

I have emptied the wastebasket and done sudo apt-get clean.

I should also explain that I know what the terminal is, but it doesn't
do me much good as I can never remember a single unix command from one
terminal session to the next. Sad but true )-:

Does anyone have any hope to offer?

Many thanks
Nigel
Headingley, Leeds