Hello, I am using HP 520 notebook. i was previously using VISTA enterprise. I deleted one partition of 10 GB for installing Red Hat enterprise server 5 because it says that 7 GB space is enough to install all the packages of Red Hat. During the installation i used custom layout to assign the partitition size and selected the size of root as 7.5 GB, size of SWAP as 2 GB ( as RAM is of 1GB size) and to /home and /user, i assigned 250 MB each. After this step i selected all the packages present in the disk, but as i proceed it alway give me an error that " to install all the packages you require 35657 MB of extra space" which means i should assign 12 GB to root partition.

Can anyone tell me why this insufficient disk space msg is comming

Thanx and Regards

Yes...you don't have enough disk space assigned, that's why you're getting the "insufficient disk space" message.

Do the math:

7.5 GB - Root
2.0 GB - swap
500 MB - /home and /usr

10GB...but there is overhead involved in formatting a disk, no matter what OS you're using, there's some loss. So 35MB more would be reasonable. Either delete some packages from your installation selection, or add more space.

And I don't know why you'd try RH Enterprise linux on a laptop. It's geared towards servers, so alot of 'consumer grade' hardware (graphics cards? Wireless? Laptop special keys?), probably won't work without a good bit of tweaking. If you're not paying for RHEL support, use CentOS or another free distro...

TB0ne, thanx for reply. I gave 8.5 GB to /root but still it asks for more. when i gave 12 GB to /root then it started installation but when installation completed, i used df -h command and viewed the space. it told me that space used by /root is around 4 GB and available is 8 GB ...:-D why is the overhead is of 7 GB?

and i installed it on my laptop because i just started learning Linux/ doing RHCE, so i installed it on laptop to practice commands and being familier with it ...furthermore, we have an application which requires more memory and processor consumption so i installed it on linux ...would it give me some advantage in running on linux over windows??

Regards

Why do you have to assign 7.5 to /root? What if you do this:

7.5 GB - /
1.0 GB - swap (the idea of swap=2xRAM is not written in stone)
1.0 GB - /home (you don't need to have a separate /usr partition)

This should work fine.

I selected the option " delete all linux partitions and create default layout" and it instaled successfully with all packages but it was not happening with selecting "custom layout".

problem solved but did not get the problem.. i.e why it was asking for more space when selecting custom layout even when the assigned space to /root is 8 GB

thanx

There is a difference between "/" (called root) and "/root" (home directory of root). If you assign all the space to "/root", where will the /usr/,/var etc. go? (I don't think 500MB is sufficient for a full fledged Redhat installation). As per my understanding, thats the problem.

I am confused about swap space reguirements. I haven't seen swap usage normally more than few tens of MB:s, why on earth allmost every distro allocate same amount than existing ram ?

You have 4G ram, then allocate 4G disk space? That's wasted space...
I normally use not more that 500MB swapspace on linux.

Of course, there are situations when swap might be needed more, but that is what i have seen while maintaining servers in 10 years period.

Today RAM amount is "normally" 1G ->
I'we seen "swapping" with 256 MB and less...

Marko