out of space in /var/cache/apt/archives

[Nori Heikkinen <nori@sccs.swarthmore.edu>]

my /var is 465M.  i'm trying to do and apt-get upgrade, which i
haven't in a while, and got the following message:

Need to get 69.0MB/109MB of archives. After unpacking 39.1MB will be
used.
E: Sorry, you don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/
to hold all the .debs.

... which is true:

orange:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5              93M   25M   63M  29% /
/dev/hda1              29M  2.1M   25M   8% /boot
/dev/hda6             6.0G  1.8G  3.8G  32% /usr
/dev/hda7              30G   27G  2.3G  92% /home
/dev/hda8             465M  407M   34M  93% /var
/dev/hda9             465M  5.5M  435M   2% /tmp

so, it's pretty full.  288M of that is in /var/cache/apt/archives, and
are a lot of debs.  can i safely delete these all to make room for the
new ones?  there's nothing here that i need for these packages to run,
right?

just checking.

</nori>

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