i have ran out of free-space on / (well i have enough to be getting on with)
on / (hda2) is: bin, dev, mnt, proc, sbin, tmp, var, etc, lib, opt
/home and /usr are on diffeent partisions with ooodles of free space.
i need to emerge -u world to update just about everyhting on my system
this works fine until it trys to emerge the Xorg updates which are massive! - therefore they cap out the spacce in /var and the process stops

so i need to mount, or link some of the space from /home (hdb1) to /var
id prefer to do this withought umounting /home or rebooting but i may if i need to.
aside from that, i dont know much about what im doing
i have already nearly dfestroyed my computer by trying to ln -s /var to /home/var

one other thing to note - im using Riser4 of everythinbg except /boot

also, as an aside could somone do a 'ls -l /' and tell me what the correct permissions for /tmp should be, not that i managed to deleet the entire forlder and thern chown it and its contence to root earlier... nope, not me... honist

any help gratfully recieved,.

for a really quick solution, why not just sym link the temp. download directory to somewhere with 'ooodles' of space?

d'oh!

none the less, it hasent worked - portage quits with some nast error message and beeps a lot:

i have tried chmoding everything relovent (even /home) to 777 but it dosent seem to work.

crm,

I ran into the same problem not long ago. I found a great solution on a Gentoo Forums posting by delta407:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=7752

Quite simply, just add a line to your /etc/make.conf that sets the PORTAGE_TMPDIR variable to the folder containing the new location
of your portage tmp folder. (i.e. if you relocated your portage tmp folder to /home/portage)
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/home"

The only requirement seems to be that the portage tmp directory MUST be named "portage"

Hope this helps,
roytoo