Every time I've installed & used linux in the past I have the same problem.
Im sure that its related to my lack of knowledge.

I have partitions set up like so:
500MB /
17 GB /usr
500MB swap

Now as I start installing new progs my root dir fills up 'til finally the system starts running crappy,
& nothing works. At boot up partmon tells me that ./ has <0> space.
I go in & rm some mp3s and stuff, then like magic everything starts running right. :P

My question is: What am I doing wrong? Why is this stuff filling up my root partion?
MF

I'm not 100% sure, but perhaps if you make "/" 17 GB and "/usr" only 500 MB, possibly it may work, but I'm not for sure though. Just a suggestion.

I think you misunderstood what the usr directory is. You must of thought that that is the home directory for your users; am I right?

Well you need to make /home 17 gigs, because that is where every users home directory is. When you download stuff to from internet, using your user account, they will go to the /home/<username> directory, and since you have set / to be 500 megs it is filling this up.

I don't think that you need to set up a partition for /usr.

maybe make / 1 Gig
/home 16.5 Gig
/swap 500 megs

Hope this helps.

i guess the /usr is for the installed programs purposes...unless u are in need of many programs installed to be running on your system, then u need to setup large disk for /usr.

Basically, there are 3 partitions which need to be setup for, as for basic setup only, they are the /, /boot and the swap.

dun worry for a large disk on the / partition, as Linux filesystem is not prone to crashing always unlike windows filesystem

Checkout this O'Reilly site for a good general explanation of the Linux filesystem layout. The site also talks about what to allocate to each high level directory in the structure, but those guidelines are by no means mandatory.

If you are going to separate the directories under / into their own partitions, just remember what each directory is for and size based on your best guess. If you load a lot of software, then maybe /usr, or even /opt, may need to be big. If you download a lot of tunes or have a lot of documents, then maybe /home needs to be large.

On my present setup I have everything, except swap, under /. I have a new hard drive that I will install soon and will probably separate out /var, do some aggressive log rotation, and hopefully not fill it up too soon. But then again, mine is just a simple, non critical home use system.

Thanx guys.
Im going down for a repartion then.
Preciate all the help