Crap, what's the deal with space in Gentoo?

jahgu

I was really excited to update to 1.4rc1. It failed on update-script3.sh because the harddrive got filled up. I HAVE searched and I now understand that deleting
/usr/portage/distfiles/*
/var/tmp/portage/*
should free up space.
But I tried this and retried script 3 last night and it didn't free up enough space. I thought that my 3.5gig hard drive would be a large enough partition.
I don't have any avi's/mp3's. Using fluxbox, and have very few prog's installed! I did not emerge gnome or kde, only the base stuff that a few other programs needed (gnome bassed stuff). I don't understand why gentoo is such a space hog. I NEED THIS SPACE TO UPGRADE. What do I do? I haven't had this problem with any of the other distro's i've tried. But I love Gentoo.
What I really want to know is what is causing all the space to be used up?
And what do I need to do

thanks in advance

ZagiFlyer · Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2002 3:31 pm Post subject:

The articles describing the upgrade process mention that it is very disk space intensive during the transition. Can you add another drive to your system? If so, you can mount that as /var/tmp or something to get you through. Otherwise, I don't know what to tell you.
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jahgu · Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2002 3:48 pm Post subject: thanks for response

Thanks,
I must have missed that in the upgrade guide. What I expect is happening is that it's got to compile everything with gcc3.2 while all the old stuff is still on there, so it'll need like twice the typical space. I don't know, i'm just guessing.

iKiddo · Guru Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 341 Location: Europe?

What we actually need is a script that deletes the files as soon as that package is installed correctly and only fetches the files when they are needed (the latter is default, but the first?), right?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

iKiddo: That's actually a very good idea... you might make a suggestion on the bug report site.

Anyonw know if that responsibility should fall to the emerge command, or something else?
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iKiddo · Guru Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 341 Location: Europe?

Done that, thanks for the tip

Hope they can do something with it, I'm not very good in scripting yet

)

jahgu · Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2002 4:30 am Post subject:

I'm writing this from Windows :cry:

what else can i say. please help.
any ideas on how i can fix my gentoo? I have a 1.5 gig windows partition to work with. My linux partition (ext3) is 3.5gig. I suppose i could resize them and give more to the linux partition. Or if someone could tell me how to mount the 1.5gig windows partition (I've tried /var/tmp). Or any other ideas.

What I'm really surprised at is that my linux partition has been filled up. I have no mp3s, avi's, and only a few apps running on fluxbox. As i mentioned above, i've tried emptying the disfiles directory, to no avail.

I must be able to do this without having to reinstall everything again. Please help me get my gentoo back
Thanks,
Carl

True · Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2002 12:13 pm Post subject:

Why not create a directory within windows (eg. c:\distfiles), boot into Gentoo and link that directory to distfiles:

mount -t vfat /dev/hda* /windows
rmdir /usr/portage/distfiles (you may want to copy over some files first!!)
ln -s /windows/distfiles /usr/portage/distfiles

BTW, maybe you could do an ln -sf to avoid deleting the origional distfiles directory. Otherwise just recreate it later on..

ch0c0b0 · n00b Joined: 24 Apr 2002 Posts: 55 Location: New York, NY

Isn't all the work being done in /var/tmp ? If I remember correctly, you can specify a different directory for this in the /etc/make.globals file. Just set it to a different partition that has space (for example, your /home directory)

rac · Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2002 8:43 pm Post subject:

Does anybody have any experience (good or bad) with using windowsy (vfat, ntfs, etc) partitions to host PORTAGE_TMPDIR? It would be nice to know if that's a good or a bad thing to recommend to people.

EDIT: Looks like I should have already known the answer. vfat is a bad idea for PORTAGE_TMPDIR, because you can't make proper symlinks with it.
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digicosm · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 23 Sep 2002 Posts: 90

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Writing to NTFS is not reliable, so I'd imagine the answer is Not A Good Idea (even if symlinks did work with NTFS).
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