I set up a system with OpenSuse 10.2 a few days ago.

I have one 54gb hard drive - which suddenly, is completely full. I have maybe 13gb worth of stuff on the drive, in addition to the OS, but I suddenly got torrent errors that told me that the hard drive had only 4% space left. 2 minutes later, the hdd was full. the torrents aren't large enough to kill 30gb+ of hdd space. About half an hour ago I deleted a bunch of files, leaving 1.5gb free. Now, it says there's 600mb free. Something is randomly eating up space, and I don't know what it is!

Also, I'm a complete newbie at this, so please keep that in mind when replying!

If something like this fills up that quickly, check your logs.

/var/logs

Some commands to help find where the most space is being used:

du
df
find

Check the man pages for their usage.

A quick look to find which directory is using the most space, do this from /:

du -sh *

when running the command above, it told me the largest folder is 9gb - my music. nothing else is even comparably large.

I have been able to still save stuff to my hdd, and even installed a program.

I tried checking the logs (although I have no clue what i'm checking them for), and it gave a whole bunch of errors for vlc media player - which i installed yesterday and it was working fine. but it's not showing up now, could that be the problem? and if so, how?

So what command or tool are you using that claims you are low on space? Output of that please..