In system info my ext4 /home directory shows total space of 51.7 gigs with 51.5 gigs available.
My ext4 / directory shows total space 19.7 gig and 7.7 gig free. Whenever I install anything it goes to the / (as guess root directory) In Dolphin it shows my /home directory but anything installed under that seems like it installs on the / directory.
If I have 51 gigs free where is it and how do I gain access?
The “/home” directory is the largest partition on your drive right?
The 51 gigs is actually your “/home” directory. So when your install programs, most of the time the actuall program installs into the
"/ " root directory somewhere. And then the settings of your program installs into your “/home” directory.
Sort of like in Windows where I would install firefox, ( installs into the “program files” ) but the settings and user bits install into the “documents and settings folder”. Both locations share the same partition and the same space. Whereas on suse both locations are on different partitions. i.e. /home is 51 gigs and / is 19.7 gig of space.
Thinks thats right, if im wrong I’m sure someone will correct here.
So if we include perhaps 2 GB for swap you have 51.7 + 19.7 + 2.0 = 73.4 GB allowcated for Linux, give or take. When you install applications, with the exception of user data, everything else goes to the / root partition, where you say you have 7.7 GB free.
When you installed openSUSE, it is suggested to use a separate partition for home and by default it will allocate more space to /home. This is to accommodate music, video & document files, some of which can be large. The free space is yours to use for any personnel files, but will not be given back to the / root partition. First off, consider this next time you reload Linux and put more space into the / root partition. You could download and make the GParted boot disk and see if it will allow you to reduce the /home partition and then increase the root partition. For this to work, you must be able to put more room at the end of the / root partition, which requires some thinking about the issue. I am not sure GParted can do this for sure.
It does not really matter until the free space ebbs below 1 GB in the / root partition, then you might start to worry, but right now you are looking good. Did you know that some of the space shown to be used, has not yet been really used and so the actual free space can be larger? Try the following command which runs sysinfo as root and see that the actual free space is larger than you thought. Here is the menu KDE Run Command:
kdesu kfmclient openProfile webbrowsing sysinfo:/
I created a shortcut on my desktop with this command to “see” the actual free space on my drives.
Thank You,
Seeing as it’s your first post, I am guessing you might be new to linux in general, in which case I think your question might be caused by something of a misconception. In Linux, and Unix systems in general, there is only one filesystem, unlike windows that has a different one for each drive (C:, D:, etc.). So in Linux a different physical drive is mounted as a folder within the filesystem. This is also true with floppies and dvd’s, they are mounted into their own directories, though if you stick to the graphical file managers you can largely ignore all of that.
So long story short, your 51 free megabytes are in the home folder, and pretty much everything else is the smaller partition, with some exceptions that you can probably ignore for a while. You gain access to it just by saving things into the home folder.
I believe the general rationale with this separation is that you can wipe out the root partition in the event of system failure or in order to re-install or upgrade openSUSE with a clean install or switch distros while preserving your data on a seperate partition.
You could download and make the GParted boot disk and see if it will allow you to reduce the /home partition and then increase the root partition. For this to work, you must be able to put more room at the end of the / root partition, which requires some thinking about the issue. I am not sure GParted can do this for sure.
Gparted does this easily, I prefer to use the parted magic live cd, the gperted live cd is good also.
Perhaps download one of these, burn it to cd, check the md5sum, boot from it, run gparted, ensure you are working with the correct disk, right click on the /home partition choose the ‘move-resize’ option, move the slider that appears in the direction you need to make extra space for / agree to the changes (they don’t happen yet). If these partitions are not beside each other that just requires a few extra steps, that applies also if one is a primary and one is a logical partition.
DO NOT AGREE TO ANYTHING LIKE “commit changes to disk”. you are only having a look around to see what can be done, There are a number of precautions needed.
Even before doing even this I would ensure I had everything I wanted to keep backed up and that the backup worked, but that always has to be done anyway, partitioning is just one of many ways to loose data, user error I feel is as much, or more of a risk.
If you were to attempt to redistribute the free space please post back here first.
right click on the /home partition choose the ‘move-resize’ option, move the slider that appears in the direction you need
After this, you of-course need to do the same with the ‘/’ partition to allow it to use that space.(this assumes no complications, I expect none).
I don’t see where I can right click and adjust size. I tried in Dolphin. Also if the above post is correct and everything is really under one file systems and /home and /root are on the same partition why would I have to this. The puzzle is if I copy to /home the size of / root decreases ?? and I still have 51 gigs free in /home
Leave it like it is. Your /home will fill, as soon as you start creating docs, put music and pictures in the folders in your /home/YOURUSERNAME
jmayernik wrote:
> I don’t see where I can right click and adjust size. I tried in Dolphin.
> Also if the above post is correct and everything is really under one
> file systems and /home and /root are on the same partition why would I
> have to this. The puzzle is if I copy to /home the size of / root
> decreases ?? and I still have 51 gigs free in /home
please do not try to adjust anything! yet…[it is probably not needed
and may be disastrous–have you a backup?]
instead, please do these three commands in a terminal/konsole, then
copy/paste all the output this forum…
sudo /sbin/fdisk -l <lower case -L & give root pass when asked
cat /etc/fstab
mount
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]
I think to get an understanding of this, you may find reading this usefull, SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE