full root partition. EASY steps to clean it

Show us the output of the following command in Terminal:

  df -Th

1) Run this command in Terminal:

  dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -nr | less

In the top of this list you will find the packages that take too much space. Decise what you don't need and uninstall them.

2) Also this command will clear your apt cache

  sudo apt-get clean

3) Restaring will clear your /tmp folder

Use bleachbit too. Avoid options which say they will take a long time and watch your browser options or it will remove things you want.

You can also remove unused old kernels aswell as remove unused apps and remove openoffice and install abiword to free up 280mb if you only use writer

Theodotos this is what i'm working with:
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 ext3 3.4G 3.2G 29M 100% /
varrun tmpfs 501M 100K 501M 1% /var/run
varlock tmpfs 501M 0 501M 0% /var/lock
udev tmpfs 501M 36K 501M 1% /dev
devshm tmpfs 501M 12K 501M 1% /dev/shm
lrm tmpfs 501M 1.9M 499M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-lpia/volatile
overflow tmpfs 1.0M 16K 1008K 2% /tmp
gvfs-fuse-daemon
fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon 3.4G 3.2G 29M 100% /home/tami/.gvfs

actionsparsnip i have no idea what bleachbit is.

From your filesystem structure it seems that everything is under the root directory (/). Besides the techniques we mentioned earlier try to clean older files from your home directory and move them on external or network storage.

bleachbit is a tool to clean up valuable space. You can download it with "sudo apt-get install bleachbit"
More info:

user@pc:~$ aptitude show bleachbit
Package: bleachbit
State: not installed
Version: 0.8.0-1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/admin
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <email address hidden>
Uncompressed Size: 1,602k
Depends: python (>= 2.4), python-support (>= 0.90.0), python-gtk2, python-glade2, python-gnome2
Recommends: python-notify, menu
Description: delete unnecessary files from the system
 BleachBit deletes unnecessary files to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. It removes cache, Internet
 history, temporary files, cookies, and broken shortcuts.

 It handles cleaning of Adobe Reader, Bash, Beagle, Epiphany, Firefox, Flash, GIMP, Google Earth, Java, KDE, OpenOffice.org,
 Opera, RealPlayer, rpmbuild, Second Life Viewer, VIM, XChat, and more.

 Beyond simply erasing junk files, BleachBit wipes free disk space (to hide previously deleted files for privacy and to improve
 compression of images), vacuums Firefox databases (to improve performance without deleting data), and securely shreds arbitrary files.
Homepage: http://bleachbit.sourceforge.net

sudo apt-get install bleachbit

then run it after closing as many apps as you can. It will clear the temp files. I suggest you clear the temporary internet files in your browser by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+DEL

This is what it's telling me:

tami@tami:~$ apt-get autoremove
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13 Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

It needs sudo as it is ran as user. The command is:

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

Will work fine