I allocated little more than 4 gig for the suse installation and it was ok in the beginning. But now I've got only 200-300 meg left and annoying warning about it every time I start YaST install. I've got a feeling that I have much more software their than I need, but I do not know how to clean it up.

What happens is that you want to install something and it requires some other packages. Since I am not an expert at all (being with Linux only few weeks) I install all packages with required name (like if it says it needs gtk2 I install everything which has gtk in its name).

So I have ended up with tons I believe of unnecessary software. I tried to open YaST and walk through everything I have but get lost immediately. Some packages I have no idae about (like tex or latex), some are in red (I assume that they are critical for the installation) although I do not need them (like evolution - I use Thunderbird anyway).

So I really do not know what to do. SuSE became very slow I an think it maybe because it has not enough of free space.

Any help!?

Let's start with tex and latex. This is a very powerful (and space consuming) word processor. If you don't know it, you don't need it

The red packages are those who have been updated via YOU. It simply means that the version you have installed is more actual than the version on your installation source. But that does not mean it's necessary.

Most packages are categorized by function. You can select those groups in the 'Filter' tab of Yast. Additionally there are short descriptions of the selected package in the lower right window.

It would have been better to start with a minimal system and adding the software you need. It is more complicated to decide what you do not need.

There is a nice applet in System -> File System called KDirStat. This shows a graphical overview of the disk usage. I use this to get rid of space wasting files from my /home. But this should be done very carefully with system files (if at all).

Thanks a lot. That's a start. BTW, what is an acceptable/average size of the suse intallation?

My root filesystem uses 5.3 GB (/home is excluded). But I experimented a lot with kernel compilations and have a lot of software and databases installed. I guess 5 GB should be sufficient for a standard system.

Update: out of pure curiosity, I ran KDirStat on my system. I found that /usr/src is about 0.9 GB (3 different kernel sources and compilations) and /usr/lib/R about 0.5 GB (a statistical programming language) and 0.6 GB of various biological databases and applications in /usr/local. That makes less than 3.5 GB for a quite comprehensive collection of software (+ your data in /home).

thanks for the update. I will try KDirStat as soon as I get home to my suse (away from this horrible patronising XP ).

As abisko00 said, start by going into YaST software install module and changing the filter. Check the little box at the bottom that says "Autocheck". When you "trash" a piece of software, it will warn you about all the other software that uses it as a dependency. You can then make a halfway informed desision about what you need and what you can toss.

Autocheck can slow you down a bit, but it's worth having for this type of activity.

By the by, I just checked, and KDirStat was not installed on my system. You can install it though from YaST (change filter to search). It's a small package, only 722.4 kB.

I just tried it, and it is useful. I open one of my folders (inside of home) and almost immediately found 360.2 MB that I could delete.

Since my last post here I have re-istalled SuSE from scratch. Having done that i made a mental note that I have more than a gig free on my Linux partition. Now I have no more than 200 meg and it's only after I removed some documentation, before that I had almost zero of free space. I wonder how I managed to fill almost 1 gig? Yes I installed some stuff, but nothing major. BTW, if I use apt-get, what happens to all those packages I download? Are they stored somewhere and then deleted or I still have them on my HD?

Where can I look at to free some space?