My 17-month old slack 9.0 install still works, but I just did df. I'm out of space on the partition mounted as /:
$ df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda9 1412584 1339492 0 100% /
/dev/hda10 947060 100136 797928 12% /var
/dev/hda11 4727712 1735880 2747648 39% /usr
/dev/hda12 11349944 5186204 5577772 49% /home

I have several available empty ext3- or Reiser3-formatted partitions on my hdd. Can I simply add a line in etc/fstab to mount a second partition as /? Or will that confuse everything?

Bad symptoms: xfig stopped exporting files to gif. KGV stopped opening PDFs. GV works fine. I've got a Slack 10 install on some other partitions, but I feel like just sticking with the old 9.0 for my daily work.

Probably some stuff in /tmp you can get rid of - it seems to be on /. If you've never cleaned it out, there may be a *lot*. Can also use find and du and other tools to check large space-wasters. Remove unneeded packages. And so on. Not sure what you mean by having two roots and I'm not sure what I'd want to hive off other than /tmp, given that /usr, /var, and /home are already off. (I usually do /tmp, /var, /home, and /usr/local.)

That root partition seems kind of small anyway. If you have another large partition, you could try *switching* roots, yeah.

-- Actually, what am I thinking of? If you've got all of /usr then the root partition should be plenty. You must have *something* wasting space.

(In mine, like I say, only /usr/local where I install my own is off - /usr itself, is on my /, which means I need a couple gigs to have breathing room.)

-- Okay, I'm going to give up now. Last edit. But when I say 'switch roots' I meant moving your current root to a larger empty partition. Just wanted to be clear about that, since you say you have a Slack 10 as well. I don't mean switch roots with *that*.

Thanks for the reply. Back in May 2004, / was using just 49%. Is there anything important in /tmp? I assume I can't just blindly delete everything in /tmp.

In the meanwhile, I'll play around with du.

Part of ls -l of /tmp was:

-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 696668160 Jan 10 19:17 f2d2191.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 135168 Jan 10 19:19 f2d2213.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 19:20 f2d2220.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 19:23 f2d2234.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 19:26 f2d2250.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 19:32 f2d2259.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 19:34 f2d2265.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 4096 Jan 10 21:05 f2d2270.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 19:47 f2d893.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 19:51 f2d903.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 20:00 f2d927.ppm
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff users 0 Jan 10 20:09 f2d961.ppm

So I moved f2d22191 to Trash -- just in case it's something I need. Now df gives me 50% usage of /.

What's a .ppm file?

Thanks for the quick response and preventing me from doing a catastrophe!

Cliff

Generally, you can. There may be some case where you shouldn't but if it's in /tmp it's *supposed* to expect to be deleted. Might not be wise to do it randomly, as some things, though temporary, might be in use, but it'd probably be fine. Some machines never go down but, if you do reboot occasionally, you can put in a shutdown script to empty /tmp if you want.

Seems to be a 'portable pixmap' - giant graphics file, I guess.

Glad it turned out to be an easy fix. If you do have a spare partition, putting /tmp on it would be good.

Now my xfig exports transparent gifs, no problem.
Now KGhostView opens PDFs again.
So they needed space in /tmp or maybe just / in order to function.
Yeah, digiot, I might just follow your advice and isolate /tmp on its own partition.
Thanks a million.