up2date and a full /var on a fresh install

[aldend123]

Just to keep everyone posted, I'm quite new to linux.

After installing Fedora 5, with /var on a 768 meg partition, I ran up2date (not knowing yum is the better alternative as I just read on your FAQ) , and after quite some time of getting it to connect to a server and begin updating, I leave it running over night. I wake up to find its almost done, but just sitting there doing nothing. After an hour or so I exit, and try again. Found out why it had stopped. Turns out /var is full, which is a 768 meg partition, made based on a Fedora book's install recommendations I bought for a class I'm taking.

Does this mean I'm full up and should get to expanding that partition, or is it simply full of stuff that no longer needs to be there and I can treat it like a windows TEMP folder and empty it?



And just throwin this one out there, if I download a program to my desktop, and run configure/make/install etc from that location on my desktop, does this copy all the files to their needed locations and I can now delete the files from the desktop, or is this now the current location the computer will look to find whatever files where involved in the installtion? And I dont mean something like an RPM, Im refering to when you have a .tar.gz folder with the source and app in the folder, which is extracted to the desktop.


Thanks

[Spoon!]

Originally Posted by aldend123

I ran up2date

Where did you even get it? FC5 doesn't come with up2date.

Originally Posted by aldend123

Does this mean I'm full up and should get to expanding that partition, or is it simply full of stuff that no longer needs to be there and I can treat it like a windows TEMP folder and empty it?

I think up2date keeps a cache of downloaded packages in somewhere like /var/spool/up2date It's unnecessary and you can delete the files in there.

Originally Posted by aldend123

And just throwin this one out there, if I download a program to my desktop, and run configure/make/install etc from that location on my desktop, does this copy all the files to their needed locations and I can now delete the files from the desktop, or is this now the current location the computer will look to find whatever files where involved in the installtion?

The "make install" should copy the results to /usr/local/bin and other subdirectories of /usr/local. You can delete or move the compilation directory if you wish (though you will need it again if you wish to do "make uninstall"). Usually people put their compilation directories some place like /usr/local/src or $HOME/src or something like that instead of the desktop.

[aldend123]

So apon reading you're reply, I was extremely embarrassed to grab my install discs and note "Release 2" clearly stated on each one of them. To make matters worse, the start-up screen that says Fedora with a 2 in the background couldn't have been more clear. I had simply assumed they were FC5 due to my assumption the book was relativly new. I suppose it's not as knew as I had assumed. Not typical of me. Seems like updating to FC5 from FC2 is my next logical step [trying to get some mp3 support, and by the looks of it, best done with FC5?...figureing out linux would be much more fun with some tunes!]

So I am downloading the FC5 discs right now... but I'm on a 40k/s capped connection
There's no way to simply update to FC5 through the use of something like yum is there?

And on that note thanks for the help because clearing that folder was exactly what I needed to do, and I then proceeded to use yum to update my old release haha.