Hi

I had a dual boot installation XP/Opensuse: this allowed me to test Opensuse while having XP. Today I got rid of xp and formatted its partition.

Therefore now I have a root partition of 8gb, a /home/myusername of 13 gb and 50 gb as ext3 (former windows ntfs). I didn't want to format everything to keep my data and linux software installations.

But now I have a problem: the root partition is almost full, as I installed more software. Now, I got this situation: about 60 gb empty and a tiny root partition full. And I need to be root while using Linux on this PC.

How to solve this situation? Is it possible that I have to stop installing software when the hd is practically empty???

Thanks
Fabio

Well, first of all, congrats on getting rid of the Evil One...
Depending on your partition layout, it may be possible for you to boot from gparted live CD and shrink your 60G partition and extend your / partition using the freed space. Back up first, of course.

What you can do, is free up a partition perhaps your former windows partition... convert it into an LVM volume, then create 4 virtual partitions for

/
/usr
/home
/var


Copy all the files from your existing / /usr /home /var partitons over to the new LVM partitions. Then set your system up to boot using the LVM's.

At this point, you can take your existing partions and whatever and nuke them, and then add them also into the LVM. Use it then to shuffle data between the partitions however you like.

I'd recommend google'ing "LVM" (Logical Volume Manager) As there are quite a few steps that would be involved, plus having an understanding of what your doing would be helpfull.

Stop this nonsense working as root, move your stuff from /root to your user's home directory and you'll be OK. Root partition 8 GB (hope you meant gigabytes with that gb not gram-bits?) should be sufficient.

Edit: Need help setting up your PC for normal user? Ask your questions, this is the purpose of these forums.

There's another thing for you to try, short of going LVM, though it's not easy and also involves a live CD. You can make /usr and /var separate partitions on your hard drive. You'd need to boot from a live CD, create two additional partitions and carefully move the stuff from your /usr and /var directories there, preserving permissions and ownership. Then, edit your /etc/fstab to reflect the change. It's dangerous, but it can be done.

The OP isn't working normally as the root user. You are confusing the root partition (/) with the /root directory. The root (/) partition is full and the ext3 filesystem reserves a small percentage of filespace that is only accessible by the root user. The OP is running as the root user because he has run out of space and can't work as a normal user until the situation is fixed.
riccisit:
The /usr hierarchy is what will grow as you install more packages. Since the XP partition is larger then either the root (/) partition or /home, I would recommend moving the contents of /home to the XP partition, and the contents of /usr to the old /home partition. This will allow a few more GB of room for /usr and free up more space in the (/) root partition so you can start using the distro as a normal user again.

If the new partition and the old /home partition are adjacent, you might consider resizing the old home partition (new /usr) so that it is 20GB. That may be a more reasonable size for /usr if you are someone who likes to try out a lot of packages. Make sure you edit /etc/fstab to reflect your changes. Operating off of a live distro would be the easiest way to proceed because none of the partitions would be "live".

Hmm. That is pretty ambiguous. Good catch jschiwal. Reading the original post, I can see it from either angle.

That said, I've had good success with gparted.

I just learned something about using gparted from another post. A user using SuSE had automounting of pendrives stop working. It turned out that the problem was that he used gparted previously. It wrote a rule in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy which stopped automounting. However it didn't remove the rule after the program finished. I don't know which version of gparted this was.

If one uses the gparted live CD, which is the only option in this case, since we need to extend the root partition, it's highly unlikely that it would write something into HAL rules...

Yeah. You definitely need the Live CD. Which was the method I have had good success with.