I install openSuSe 10.2 on my laptop, using /home on a seperate partion. and I really haven't installed much since the base install, just a couple of packages, and updates.

But I've noticed that my free space in the root partion is slowly growing smaller, I still have 1.1GB free, but I would like to know besides removing packages is the any other maintance I can do to free up space.

I don't need more space, it's just that it seems to be growing, I presume log files and system temp files, but I don't know where or how to deal with this, and I thought I should learn before I run out of operating space.

How is your partition table set up? (with sizes)

Well my partion table is set for each distro's installation to use the same /boot and /home, but each distro holds their own / (root) with the rest of the file system.

hda1=/boot 350mb
hda2=/ for debian 7gb
hda3=/ for suse 7gb
hda5=/ for vectorlinux 7gb
hda6=/ for fedora 7gb
hda7=/home 8gb
hda8=swap 1gb

These are just rough sizes the drive is a 40gb drive linux only sees 37gb or something like that.

Most likely the log files. Look under the /var/log directory and see if there are any huge files.

Can you post the output of the command "fdisk -l" (without the quotes) ?

Most likely this has to do with the manufacturers 40GB and the actual 37GB !!