thanks guys. i finally found the culprit. just as you suggested dann, a guy at my LUG helped me last night with the "du" command. turns out a game i installed months ago (and forgot about) got installed to the root partition and was taking up 5 gigs. once i got rid of that my root partition looks more normal.
i upgraded last night. everything seemed to go smooth. but, today i noticed my volume is not working correctly. at 16% and below its basically muted. at 17% and above, its full volume.
i think it might be the infamous pulseaudio again. i'm going to look into that later.
Karmic Koala turning out to be Linux' version of Windows ME?
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