More Room on /
 

My system

I am using Mandrake 8.0. So I have DiskDrake.

I am using a 60 GB hda1. It is partitioned as follows:

Device Type Size Free Space

/dev/hda1 ext2 3.36GB .732GB
/dev/hda6 ext2 834MB 789MB
/dev/hda7 ext2 2.93GB 1.7GB
Free Space 2.00GB 2.0GB
/dev/hda9 ext2 8.60GB 5.76GB
/dev/hda10 ext2 4.80GB 0GB
/dev/hda11 ext2 22.8GB 0GB


Problems:

My browser (Navigator) occasionally vanishes.

If I go to certain Web pages (Boston Globe, for instance) the entire system freezes up, and I have to re-boot.

I am told I do not have enough space on /hda1 to upgrade to Mandrake 8.2


My goal:

To get enough space to upgrade to Mandrake 8.2 and to WordPerfect Office 2000.


Conundrum:

I try to delete material from / (/hda1) to make room, but cannot find enough stuff to delete. In fact, I can't for the life of me figure out how I am using 3GB in /. I made it that big so that I would always have enough room, and I still don't.

I try to move things around with DiskDrake so that I can add the 2GB unused space on my hard drive to /, but it appears that DiskDrake cannot resize the / partition.


Questions:

Can anyone tell me where to look to find more unnecessary stuff to delete so that I can get more room on / ? I've tried /usr, /tmp, /opt, and everything else I can think of.

If that doesn't work, can anyone tell me what to use to manipulate the space on my hard drive so that I can enlarge / ? (This is the second best option, because if I can't figure out how I've gotten / so big, I'll just keep filling it up, no matter how big I make it.)

[I'm suspecting that PartitionMagic is the answer to the second question.]

If anyone needs any additional information to formulate a reply, please tell me what it is, and I'll supply it.

Thanks for all help.

I'd stay away from Partition Magic and Linux partitions, nothing but trouble in my case anyhow. GNU parted will resize linux partitions or as you said DiskDrake which would be easiest. Mandrake installs so much during install that 3G isn't all that much unfortunately. I think the best way is going to be to go into dikdrake and shrink hda9 a gig or so and then enlarge hda1.

Or run manrdake expert install (which is easy, in fact) and choose packages to install to fit 3GB.

Plese post output from df -m
Do yo mean "/" or /root?
Nothing shouldn't be writing to "/"

Assuming /dev/hda1 is / then you still have over 750mb
of free space so there shouldn't be a problem.

Are you logged in as root when this happens? If so STOP.
You should be using you user account, and su - root
only when required.

df -m output:

Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda1 3443 2534 735 78% /
/dev/hda6 834 2 789 0% /boot
/dev/hda7 2355 1135 1149 50% /cases
/dev/hda9 8802 2278 6077 27% /home
/dev/hda10 4918 4910 0 100% /research
/dev/hda11 23364 22751 0 100% /files
/dev/hda8 9836 5017 5017 54% /oldcases


df -m reports no /root, nor does Disk Free.

What is writing to, or using up the space on, / (/dev/hda1) is very much what I would like to know. I have tried to regain some space on that partition by deleting files in places such as /tmp and /opt, and it appears that there is a relation to /.

I do indeed have about 750 MB available, but the installation program seems to want a little more than 900 MB. As suggested, I could install in Expert mode, and not install some things like games, but I would be right up against the wall, and I would rather have some slack.

Plus, I want to install WordPerfect Office 2000 (recommended disk space - 500MB) in /opt, and I am afraid that will show up as space used in /.

I am indeed logged in as root, and thought I had to be to install/upgrade. I'll re-check.

You can move anything in /tmp

/root is "root" home direcotory is't not a sepearte partition.

/opt contains stuff like gnome kde

Two other options:

1. move /opt to a seperate partition of it's own , and then edit /etc/fstab to mount it under /opt.

1a. To manualy mount a partition:
mount /dev/part_id /what_ever_mount_point

You see, there are things like /usr, /var and /tmp all are part of / which means that /tmp is flooding your system with temporarily used files (for instance when you download 3 iso images(650 Mb ea) simultaneously they get stored first in /tmp -> 3x650Mb is going to /tmp flooding your /, next /var all the logs are flooding / as well (try to clean some of them /var/log is a good condidate), /usr by the FHS (file system hierarchy standart) /usr is the directory where all user programms reside, so if it is a part of / it affects root (/) in a greate degree. So, what I'd do I would back up all the /files, /oldcases other critical data you might have and do clean install of Mandy 8.2 keeping in mind creating separate partitions for /, /usr (at least 3 Gb for full mandy install), and /tmp.

FHS is bull of beans,
They problem is he/she need to make more room on the root disk, that what I was addressing specifly

Is it a bull of pickledbeans? just kidding don't get offended. anyway almost all the programms you install by default are going into /usr, usr/local, so to make /usr a separate partition is reasonable.

Your are wrong ol' pegnum breath :)
The ones I install go under there own subdirectory

./configure --prefix=/opt/apache ...etc

Which according ti FSH is where "optional" program go...
which of course inlcudes (IMHO) databases, mozilla, ssh?, apache . and office suites.

It is fairly common in "production" settings to give a group
of people "ownership" of a set processes, for instantance, placing Apache under it owns directory tree , you can hand it over to the web-dev folks, and eveything they need
is under /opt/apache.

I'm speaking from experience here dealing with large corporate data centers.

I know all this you can install wherever you want, but concider a regular linux user who is told to do
./configure
make
make install
after these steps it would go anywhere the developer pleases, after OS installation where most likely you will find an executable, in /opt?
Yeah we are getting into a flame war here, so let's not, let's help the guy who needs an advise to get around it, I know what it's like when you have less then 5% of free space left ( of course if these 5% are not 53432 Therabytes),I think in this case the re-install is inevitable, unless he/she wants to shrink /home partition, get rid of /files, /oldcases and /cases all together, and resize / with parted. As for me I'd never go for reinstall unless it is a last resort when there is no way out, but ....

I appreciate the efforts of all to get me to my destination. It appears I am going to be using all of the suggestions. I need a little more information, though, to get me all the way home. So I would appreciate, again, any thoughts on the following matters.

Where I am now -

I moved everything from dev/hda7 (/cases), then tacked on some free space at its end, and ended up with a 4.8GB partition.

Next, as suggested by pickledbeans, I am going to mount it as /programs or /executable or /applications or some such, and as suggested by neo77777, override the defaults on whatever I install in the future and put them on this partition.

This solves problems from the future, I hope, but as for the present, it only brings me back to the beginning: I have a 3.4GB / partition, and I want to get Mandrake 8.2 onto it. As for upgrading, I only have 735MB free, and that appears not enough to upgrade. As for deleting some things from there, it doesn t appear possible. If I deleted what little is left of /tmp, I would get back only a few MB. Other than mount points, the only ls shows to be there are bin, dev, etc, lib, lost+found, mnt, opt, proc, samples, sbin, shbin10, shlib10, tmp, usr, and var. I don t know, but I seriously doubt that I can delete enough of them to get the space I need to upgrade to 8.2

It doesn t appear from the posts to this point that, even though I have free space on the drive, I can get that space taken from one partition and allocated to /. Much less that I can do it safely.

So my next scheme - and this is what I would like advice on - is to delete everything on /, and then just install. Do it in Expert Mode (I did that for 8.0), as suggested by Mara, and not install things that I am never going to use, like games. I have 8.2 on CD s. After everything is cleared, I just shutdown, slap in CD Number One, and boot up. It seems like I would have plenty of room. It all appears like it would work. But before I delete everything under /, I would like to know if everything is as it appears, or if there is some hidden danger here.

Again, thanks for all of the help.appears

What about one big partition? Or - if needed - one small bot partition at the beginning and the rest one partition?

Anyway, I'd use standard names and not reconfigure everything to use /applications or the like - it might prove to be a little bit difficult.

Bad idea if in the case of Difficult / is getting bloated and no light is seen then all the /cases, /old_cases, /whateverisimportant is going down with /. So it is better to have separate partitions for your most critical files.

In my opinion today's file systems are stable enogh.