Cleaning Gentoo
 

Hello everybody. I just recently installed gentoo and after a few minor hickups I am very pleased with it. I am however a little concerned with the amount of disk space it is using. I have barely installed any packages and I'm up to 5Gb already. I suspect that emerge has something to do with it.

Are these packages deleted after they are downloaded and extracted or are they the cause of all this disk usage? Is this type of disk usage normal for a newly installed system with just XFree and Fluxbox installed?

You can probably clean up a bunch of files that were downloaded in /usr/portage/distfiles

They're already installed so they're ready to be rm'd

So portage does not delete those files? I can safely delete everything in /usr/portage/distfiles ?

I'm not the expert, but whenever I have trouble with an emerge the suggestions seem to include erasing the contents of that directory and starting again. My guess is that whatever is in that directory is part of a package that was not installed.

You will need to manually clean your tmp/portage directory (compile storage).

If you remove the packages in your /usr/portage/distfiles and need to re-compile them, they will have to be re-downloaded. That's ok with a dsl, but not a very good idea on my 56k dialup.. :(

Check the Gentoo forums for a script to clean out stale distfiles if on a dialup before deleting them.

I have a cable modem and all the packages are downloaded pretty quickly. /usr/portage/distfiles takes up 976Mb. So I guess I can safely delete these files.