Dear Members,
Happy New year to all of you. I have been using Fedora core 6 for last one & half years along with Windows XP in a dual booting system. Mine is a Pentium IV with speed 1.6 GHz and 512 MB SDRAM. Now I want to install Fedora core 9 from an almost everything DVD coming with the book "Fedora 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible" by Christopher Negus. But everytime I tried to install with customizing the packages by choosing the individual packages partitioning using custom layout after running 'preparing to install' for sometime an error message comes saying "There was an error running your transaction for the following reasons(s): insufficient disk space, file conflicts
Deatails : You need more space in the following file systems : 321 M on /mnt/sysimage/usr"

My linux partitions are:
/dev/sda5 / ext3 8001 MB
/dev/sda6 swap 1028 MB
/dev/sda7 /usr 9131 MB

I also tried with different combinations of memory size of partitions, even sometime adding another partition /boot, but with the same result.I could not fathom out it.

Ultimately, I installed the system with minimal packages. But now I want to install the packages from the DVD which I haven't installed. Add/Remove programme install only from the net. The book suggested to use the command "yum localinstall /media/disk/Fedora/Packages/PACKAGE NAME'. But this is not working saying that 'it could not open' the said package. First of all the DVD is mounted on /mnt, not /mnt/disk and secondly the name of the disk is 'Fedora 9 i386 DVD'. I changed the command line accordingly and run it as root. But still it is not working. Feeling hopeless. I want your help.
-SKD

It seems you dont have enough free space in '/dev/sda7'.

BTW, you dont need to have a separate partition for the /usr directory

The name of the disk is irrelevant for the yum command. It's just a label of the DVD file system. Did you try yum localinstall /mnt/Fedora/Packages/PACKAGE NAME? The Fedora and Packages are just names of directories on the DVD file system. If you open the DVD in a GUI file manager, you should be able to navigate to the Packages sub-directory and see all the packages that are on the DVD.

You might also want to look in your book for a discussion of /etc/yum.repos.d/ which should describe how you can add the DVD to the default repository list so all you need to do is a yum install PACKAGE NAME.

Thank you PTrenholme & r1d3r.
I have tried yum localinstall /media/Fedora/Packages/PACKAGE NAME e.g., k3b*. But it is not working. I will try /mnt/Fedora/Packages/PACKAGE NAME.
Also I have navigated the DVD already got the name of the packages. Only problem is it is difficult to know which ones are installed except few. May be there is some way I do not know. I am also trying to get the way to add the DVD in the repository.

About r1d3r's suggestion about partitioning, what I know is that the softwares are generally stored in /usr. I could have created /root, <swap> & /home which is suggested by some others. But perhaps atleast three partitions are needed.

Hoping for more of your reply
-SKD

Generally, only one partition is actually needed: "/", although having swap on its own partition is usually a good idea since then swap can use its own partition type. (This scheme, with only / and swap, is what is used by Ubuntu and several other distributions.)

By default, Fedora will use two partitions - but with a different organization. The installer (anaconda) will create two partitions, /boot and a "Logical Volume Group (VG)" partition. Then it will create two "logical" partitions in the VG, one for / and one for swap. The reason for having /boot on its own partition is simply because the GRUB version used by Fedora cannot access the contents of a VG, and the GRUB "Stage 2" process needs to be able to read the contents of /boot.

All that is by way of saying that the whole "Logical Volume Management" system is best avoided unless you have a fairly large disk farm and need the flexibility of being able to mix dissimilar physical devices into a single "logical" device.

The disadvantage of having several partitions on a single disk is that the size of the parts of the file system on any partition are limited by the physical partition size. By keeping the number of partitions as small as possible, you optimize the use of your hard drive. There is no advantage to keeping parts of the file system in separate partitions unless you wish to impose artificial limits on your system use. (Note that the UNIX "file system" concept stands in stark contrast to the old fashioned concept that each storage device can only be accessed as a separate "thing." When the only "storage device" available was punched cards or magnetic tape, the older concept made some sense, but those days are rapidly fading into the mists of history.)

See if you can install the yumex package to get a nice GUI interface to yum. You can then display a list of all your installed packages. Or, if you're using GNOME or KDE, look in the menu for a "Package Manager" application. Most of those will also list your installed packages.

If you prefer working from the command line, look at the "query" options in man rpm to see how to generate a list of your installed packages.

You are partially right, but no not ALL software are installed in that directory.

For example ktorrent and virtualbox and some other GUI programs are installed in the /opt and some of CLI programs are in the /bin directory, and the ones that require super user password are located in /sbin.

BTW, when you reinstall your distro, it will reinstall them, and besides it is somewhat annoying to see some programs installed on your system but your package manager says its not!

Thanks for your valuable knowledge about partitioning. Perhaps then if I make only two partions ("/" & <swap>) & may be add a small partition /boot, that disk shortage would not occur.

About my earlier problem, since the disk is automatically mounted in /media, the "localinstall /mnt/Fedora/Packages/PACKAGE NAME" would not work. I used package manager also. Since it use internet connection, it is a bit time consuming. Also I could not still add the DVD in the repository. I tried to copy the rpm packages into my local directory and then by yum localinstall. It is working but again it is downloading dependencies from internet which are quite big and perhaps not needed could I install them from the DVD. I might try to install them using rpm command, but that might again be aborted for requirement of dependencies. I was thinking that can I install the uninstalled packages if I try to upgrade by using the same DVD although I have doubt about it. May be I have to repartition my system according to your suggestions and reinstall the system.

Strange. Does your Fedora 9 book tell you how to create a repository definition for a DVD?

It's fairly easy, and would let you avoid the slow Internet connection until you wanted to update a program to a newer version.

Basically, all you need to do is create a file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and then yum will look at the DVD for RPMs.

Here's one way to do it:

Just open a terminal window and enter the bold text in this:Note that that sets up the DVD repository as disabled by default. That's so yum will not "barf" when the DVD is not mounted.
The options passed to yum in the last line first disable the default repositories so the Internet won't be accessed and then enable the DVD repository.

The baseurl line, above, may need to be changed. You can verify the value to put in that line by using the ls commad to locate the respodata directory. For example, here's what I see when I do the ls on a Fedora 8 DVD. (Fedora 8 because I couldn't find a fedora 9 DVD right now.)What you want after the file:// part is the path to the directory that contains the repodata subdirectory.

Hope this helps.

Thank you very much. It is working.