Running SUSE 10.2, with a well-established and stable system.

Somehow, and unexpectedly, my root partition has become full.

/home is on a separate partition with plenty of space, so that isn't the problem.

I can no longer run KDE - it just bombs out back to the log-in screen.

The question is: what should I look for to throw away, and regain some disk space?

Look in /var/log for excessively large log files. Perhaps a find command mixed with du might give you an idea of which your worst offenders are. Something like:will give you your top 20 largest directories. Change the / in the find command to a specific directory, such as /var, for example.

If you are not in the habit of clearing out cache folders and old logs, it's time to do some housecleaning.

Boot into runlevel 3.

In your home folder, run 'ls -a | less'. Look for the hidden folders (.kde, .thumbnails, etc). Look into all of the hidden folders for cache folders, and empty them. .thumbnails doesn't have folders; all the files are cached files. Delete them.

Then cd to /var/log. If you have logrotate working, you will have old rotated logs you can delete. Look for .gz, .old, and similar logs you can delete.

For the rest of the logs, run 'ls -l' and take note of the file sizes. Large logs can be cleared with '/dev/null > filename' which empties the named file.

After you have created a bit of room for kde to load the necessary files in /tmp, you should be able to 'init 5' and get back into GUI mode.

Good suggestions, but...

I've checked the log files, and there is nothing large in there.

Caches, etc, are in the /home partition, and that isn't the one that is full (unless there are some other caches elsewhere)?

What next?

/tmp

Delete .tmp files. Also delete things that seem to be temporary in nature. Leave alone folders which pertain to users, sockets, etc.

The usual offender for filespace usage is /var, which contains "variable" (i.e. data) files, used for databases, caches and so on.

Since you didn't say what software the box runs, I don't know if we're talking about a database server or web+email workstation, so that makes it hard to guess exactly what might be taking up space on your disk.

You can find out how much disk space a directory takes up, including subdirectories, by running (replace /var with the directory you want to look at).

/var/log contains log files that grow over time; you can use logrotate to truncate and delete them periodically if that's your problem.

Hope that's of some help,

—Robert J Lee

Edit: You may want to run This will take a while but it will list the largest directories/subdirectories so you can see where your space is going. Press q to exit less.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I ended up with a more radical solution. I've started afresh with a clean Suse 10.3 install, and given it much more space this time.

Because all my data is on a separate partition, it wasn't too painful to restart with a clean install.

Bit of a shame to pass up on such an opportunity, innit? First of all that was totally unnecessary (different ways to fix it where given) and secondly you managed to *not* learn more about *why* this happened and *how* to manage it properly...

Actually, his solution was probably inevitable in the long run.

One quirk of the openSuSE installation, is that it defaults to a smaller root partition and a large (actually...Huge in comparison) /home partition. It also defaults to the root and /usr on the same partition... which is where a lot of SuSE users get hungup since most packages installed will fill that partition rapidly.

People new to linux, or simply inattentive users, don't realize that if they are installing linux on a machine used as a desktop workstation (as opposed to building a network server) then they should either A) have a large root partion if /usr is sharing the partition and a somewhat smaller /home partition, or B) have a small root partion, a moderately sized /usr partition, and a /home partion. Of course it's usually nice to keep /var on a separate partition as well other directories, but on a home desktop environment, that usually gets to be pretty moot.

openSuSE's installation really should give you different proposals based on what you'll be using the machine for.