Ah, people wot does things proper...

I just click on the Mint icon (bottom left), from the menu which appears click home/username, click the arrow to "Open the parent folder" a couple of times, find the /var folder, right click on it and click "Properties" - which reveal /var to be (at the moment) 432.4 MB. (Now feel a complet cyber-peasant.)

I suspect the size of /var varies, though - is that not where update caches occur? I'm rather hoping so, to be honest.

Meantime this (if it works) is coming to you from a live session of the shiny new antiX-12.

It's running slowly but adequately on a Toughbook CF-27 with a 300mHz P2 and 256 mb of RAM.

Goodness, but eBay is horrid on a slow computer with no NoScript, AdBlock etc. It's amazing how much time is wasted waiting for rubbish like googleanalytics to load (and I hope it enjoys its sojourn in the mighty 256 mb of RAM, 'tho it's doubtless slurping up IP address and goodness knows what else.

Bit late now, but I think I'll try installing this. It looks most impressive. 120MB of RAM in use, no swap, and the ancient CPU lurching up to about 75% with my high-speed *ahem* typing - mostly lower than that.