I installed 11.2 on a system this weekend; but I think it’s confused about disk space:
The disk is a software-RAID(5) array, giving me ~3TB of storage.
I made a /home partition of 2.6TB, and ‘My Computer’ reckons that 135GiB is OCCUPIED.
However, doing a’DF /home’ reckons that only 254MB is occupied…
Anyone else seen this??
Sounds like a bug indeed - I wouldn’t put much value on sysinfo:/ but instead trust fdisk / df.
Isn’t those 135 GB the 5% of space that is reserved by default to have leeway in case of a full filesystem?
Umm, don’t know! I don’t see that on other SuSE systems (but then they don’t have such HUGE storage!!)
Anyway, if that is reserved space, why didn’t ‘DF’ show it??
I’ve not come across anything that reserves space; they’ve always just responded with something like:
/filesystem full
/filesystem full
/filesystem full
…
Every ext2/ext3 (and I suppose ext4) file system is created with 5% reserved space by default. This being normaly not available to users, *df *will not show it as part of the space on the partition like all the other space used for he organisation of the fs (inodes). When the partition is full and processes run by root (which can use that reserved space) create more files, you can even reach the 104% full mark!
This reserved space is there because then, even when someone filled a partition, the system can continue running (creating more logging, etc). Giving root change to repair. When are you stiill with me, it will be clear that on user data only partitions these reseved space might not be needed. Also on todays big partitions the 5% eats away a considarable amount of space (absolute, not relative).
As said, the 5% is only the default. This default can not only be changed at fs creation, but also on the flight. See:
man tune2fs
and concentrate on the -m option. You will see that
tune2fs -m 1 /dev/...
will give you more space at once 
Even -m 0 is possible, but I would only do that when I need it realy.
Henk - thanks for the informative reply!!
Umm, I understnad why DF wouldn’t show that reserved space, but WHY does sysinfo:/ show it??
I will do the tune2fs mod; I don’t need 135GB reserved in the home partition… 3GB is more than enough.
Don’t know about sysinfo:/ . The designer probably thought different about what is usefull information then the designer of df (as they are about 30 years apart 
).
My personal opinion is that the GUI info is more for the end-user and not for the system manager. Thus I would have given the space that can be used by the end-user. One could try to ask for a change here.
I mostly do not look at system information through the extra layer of a GUI (only for a glance) in my role as system manager. I do prefer the real tools.
And in my role of end-user, I almost never look at it, because I don’t bother as an end-user (my wife doesn’t look also at it ).
Agreed; seems odd behaviour to give that info. to a user, when it isn’t in DF.
I wouldn’t have looked at sysinfo:/ just that this isn’t my PC - I built it for a local museum.
Odd that - giving such an up-to-date PC to a museum; I’ve got an old CP/M machine here they could have, more in-keeping
Thanks again.
They probably got fed up of users complaining at being confused, because the disk had 500MiB left but the system told them it was full.
I have an empty file system, with just journal file in it, and sysinfo:/ is showing space used, as journal + reserved.
Probably a bad idea to alter the reservation. It’s there to avoid excessive fragmentation and maintain reasonable throughput, not just so root can have more space. When you try to use the last bit, files will be scattered all over the disk.
But have one massive /home partition isn’t the greatest idea either, and you’ll probably never find a way to comfortably fill it.
Yes, GUIs are like statistics, you can prove everything with it lol!
But 5% on such a big partition makes a huge amount of space. I think 1% is enough to avoid excessive fragmentation. It depends on the sort and size of files you will put there. Performance tuning is a specialists job anyhow.