I am trying to upgrade from Mandriva 2005 LE to 2006 free and have received the message
"Your system does not have enough space left for installation or upgrade (140 > 68)"

I have 4 partitions:
/home with 2 GB free
/ with 64 MB free
/usr with 200 MB free
/var with 620 MB free

Which partition does not have enough space for the upgrade?
(Based on the numbers I would guess the / partition ... does anyone know if this is correct?)
Is there any way to tell it to use space on another partition?

- TSloth

Which program are you using to upgrade?

Mandriva 2006 Free
3 CD version using downloaded ISO's

Im guessing, if Mandriva is similar to slackware, you might be better backing up your data and doing a clean install. Whatever program your using Mandriva to update with, like Slapt-get for Slackwre or Apt-get for debian linux, there is probably a .conf file in its directory that you can configure and tell it to use whatever partition you'd like. I'm not familar with Mandriva personally but it shouldn't be hard to find on Google. I'd switch to your home partition if possiable, 2gigs should be plenty of space to do what you need. In the end though, I think backing up and then doing a clean install would be a easier, and maybe a better option. Looking at the size of your partitions, you probably don't have to much to back up anyway, i'm guessing 1 or 2 CD-Rs.

I'd say the root partition, 64MB is incredibly small to install an OS onto and I don't know how you managed to get 2005LE onto it. I'd follow Penguin of Wonder's suggestion and backup your stuff and do a complete reinstall, this time making a bigger root partition, or maybe get a bigger hard disk if you can since that is a very, very tiny amount of space you've got there.

I'm surprised you got Mandriva to install on a partition setup like that. It likes 3 partitions: root, swap and home.

I have got 2006 running on a 2gb machine (not this one) with the partitions as above. Root has 1750mb, swap about 330 (I tried 128 but it said it needed 2X memory which I think is about 160) and home has the rest. You have to set the partitions manually.

I had to be very picky about software but I got KDE running with Abiword and other small softwares. It won't give me very good colour resolution and I think this is because of having KDE. Soon I'll try again with another smaller desktop (I have already installed with a smaller desktop but didn't notice what the resolution was like.)

Actually Mandrake/Mandriva is pretty flexible about partitions.
If, when you do a clean install (like I did with Mandrake 10.1), you ask for custom partitioning, it will give you the opportunity to have lots of different partitions: boot, root, home, tmp, var, swap, and several others IIRC.
When you do an upgrade (like I did to 10.2/2005LE and to 2006, it just uses the same partitions.

The 2 main problems I've encountered with small partitions is if you try to do a massive upgrade over the network it will fill up one of the partitions, and if you try to copy a CD then K3B will want 700+ MB free in one of the partitions. Alas, in both cases I can't remember which partitions it wanted so much space in.

rrsc1694, you mention having low color resolution. This is not a result of the desktop but of how much memory it detects (or assumes) on your graphics card.

If you are short of disk space, memory, or processing power, then try the IceWM window manager. KDE does more things for you (like putting icons on the desktop when you plug in USB devices). IceWM takes up a lot less resources because it has fewer "bells and whistles". ... but this should be discussed in another topic.

- TSloth

I wasn't really looking for help, it was just a comment on my experience - but thanks. I have had better resolution with windoze and an older version of mandrake so I think it is 'assumption' but it is just an old machine I play with - not an urgent issue.

When you are using K3b you can tell it which partition to use for temporary work space in the options.

firstly since you have very little space to shuffle around
install mandriva from the 2006 cd
/ with 64 MB free
/usr with 200 MB free
/var with 620 MB free
merge those three partitions that way at least youll have more future options
eg give you 880MB free that can be used for anything
(also at later stage its easier to add another hdd to take up the slack of /var and/or /usr)

i surprised it forced you have a set size swap.

i didnt have anytroubles accidentily not adding a swap to mandriva 10.1 with 256 meg ram.

It was a warning that things would (rather than 'may') go wrong rather than a 'force'.