I have 3 partitions:
I can’t install anything anymore because my root partition seems to be full somehow. I do not understand how this is possible. I have only installed kde4 (not gnome) and did not install that many software. I always have been fine with this setup until now.
What can I do beside formating and reinstalling opensuse? Is there a way to check if something else is wrong? I really do not believe I have that much data installed…
Take a look at this thread:
Disk Full Problem - openSUSE Forums
often its a simple case of /var/log/messages and /var/log/warning taking up all your hard drive space.
Hi,
it’s just a lucky guess but you can try to clean up the tmp directories located in /tmp and /var/tmp. Before you do this you can verify if this is your problem by executing du -hs /tmp and du -hs /var/tmp.
There could be also the possibility that your logs are running full. I haven’t seen that very often but I had one case where they got faster filled than rotated (through logrotate). The logs are located in /var/log.
Hope this helps
Thanks for the quick replies! This is my output:
Susanne:~ # du -hs /tmp
13G /tmp
Susanne:~ # du -hs /var/tmp/
38M /var/tmp/
Does this mean my tmp folder is using 13 GB??? How can it contain so much data on such a short period (couple of weeks)?
If you’re going to remove stuff from /tmp or /var/tmp, I’d do it from a live CD. Running systems can often be quite averse to things unexpectedly disappearing…
But my money’s on the logs.
To clean /tmp and /var/tmp, I switch to runlevel 1, remove their content, and reboot.
In the tmp folder there is a kde-<username> folder. This folder has many folders like: dolphinbe3399.tmp. These folders contain mp3 files totalling to 13 GB. Is this a bug in dolphin? I have examples enabled in dolphin for audio and video…
And how do I switch to runlevel 1 in command line?
Don’t know about dolphin.
To switch to runlevel 1, and do the rest:
su
[Enter password]
init 1
rm -rf /tmp/* /var/tmp/*; reboot
Ok that solved my problem. Hopefully I will not encouter it a 2nd time…
You can automate this in ‘/etc/sysconfig.’ Open the editor in Yast, and in System -> Cron, you’ll find several parameters for clearing the tmp directories (MAX_DAYS_IN_TMP, CLEAR_TMP_DIRS_AT_BOOTUP). I don’t know how yours grew to 13GB, but this should prevent it from happening in the future.
I guess you did NOT read the link I provided: Disk Full Problem - openSUSE Forums
If you look at post # 3 in that thread, you will see I had a disk with 625 GB free fill up in less than a few days !! There were two reasons:
a. I killed a print job at the printer, but not on the PC, which kept trying to send the job (silly of me) and that flooded the log with messages and
b. I disabled having system messages coming to my user when I’m the only user. That was not the brightest move in my repertoire and its possible I would have received a system message warning me if I had not done that.
I had that happen to me with my .xsession-errors once. My home directory filled up in less than an hour. This seems like a bug to me, there should be some control over the logs and disk space. Although, I suppose it does get your attention right away and forces you to examine your logs. 
You’re right and I apoligize for that but I was in a hurry to fix the issue;-). But for my problem, logs are not the issue. My temp folder was full of mp3 files scattered over different dolphin*.tmp folders. I have no idea what caused this. Maybe the preview in dolphin has bugs?!
I am using openSUSE with Clonezilla and quickly ran out of space of my home folder. So I used gparted to move free space from “/” to “/home” - I gained 15Gs. But then home filled back up because of my images. So I deleted like 3 or 4 images from the home folder - which are 8-10Gs each! But when I did this, the computer still said I had no space left! Rebooting didnt fix it either. Poking around, I got into my home/partimgs folder (where clonezilla stores images) and then I click the option to show hidden files. What appeared was a folder called “.trash” and it was 58Gs!!! I had to log into to root to delete it and immediately I gained all my HDD space back.
Empty your trash