How much space does fedora actually need?

[shadowwyvern]

I installed FC5 on my oldish laptop (1.2Ghz) and gave root a 4.3GB partition, /home a 7.5 GB partition, and 768MB of swap. I get everything configured how I like it, and then do a yum update. Said it had 700MB of updates, I let it go and went to sleep. I wake to a screenful of errors regarding no disk space. How much does fedora need to comfortably work with, or is there an option for yum to clean up as it goes? I did not even have all that much installed, just gnome, development libraries (sicne you can't live without those), some basic stuff like firefox. I did not even have any office tools installed. So how much should I allocate it, given my laptop has only 30GB of space and I need windows on it too.

[tomcat]

A 4,3 GB partition should be more than enough for a normal setup. Check your systems space allocation. Are there big log files in /var/log? If yes, remove them if they do not store anything important. Check your diskspace with "df" then run "yum clean all" as root and check with df again if there is any change. If you are still short on space afterwards, upgrade your system step by step.

[techmatt]

You also my want to make sure all trash folders are emptied along with the tmp folder that can take a lot of space sometimes

[daverj]

also, unless you have a pantload of users or you are using home for development purposes, why would you want 7.5G for /home? That seems aweful excessive to me.


davidj

[shadowwyvern]

First, in my post, the OS was installed for less than 12 hours. All I had put on it was a few themes, a desktop background and freenx. Thats it. I have such a big /home partition so I can store files. If there si soem other convention for allocating space, let me know.

And now, I cannot even log into the system, my session gets kicked off instantly. Probably due to lack of disk space.

I ram yum clean all from an ssh session, and now have 573MB free and can log in graphically. So, how do I perform an incremental upgrade? Not that it matters since I will probably reinstall to give / more space anyway... The idea right now is to have a large /home partition so that when I boot into windows I can mount it in windows with full read/write support and not worry about the actual Linux system getting messed with.

[Jman]

I'd double the free space a yum update says it needs, because rpms are compressed a bit and they need space to extract to. So you'd need close to 1.5 GB.

A desktop install of Fedora is not all that lightweight.