What it the correct amount of free space for the root partition?
 

I recently tried a frugal/poor mans install of knoppix that I placed in a folder in the root partition of /home (hda7) in opensuse 11.3. I decided to delete the folder and contents. The hard drive was busy for several minutes and after it was finished, I checked the disk usage and found that / was at 97% capacity, up from what was 10gig of free space. I could not find any traces of the deleted folder or its contents, so I used puppy linux and ran e2fsck on the / partition. Puppy linux reported 1.9gig free space and opensuse reported .5gig free space. My concern is if the deleted folder is taking up space in the root partition that I can not locate and why the difference in reported disk space usage in hda7. Also, if more packages are installed, where are they placed (/ or /home)?

Might be time to empty trash. Better to delete these sort of things from the CLI rather than use the GUI and have it copy from one place to another.

I found that trash is a hidden file. On this box (opensuse 11.1) it is in the /home partition. On the box in question, I opened dolphin from a root shell and deleted the file from the trash folder. That is when I saw the increase in partition space used. Is there another trash folder in the root partition and if so, where do I find it?

I found a solution to configure the cron file to delete all temp files at bootup.

CLEAR_TMP_DIRS_AT_BOOTUP="yes"

freed 15gig of space.