Mandriva Partitioning

Is it possible to install programs in Mandriva from repositories that you have already setup into another location other than root? For instance, when I started out with Mandriva a little while back, I used a precompiled script to setup all my repositories.

When I go into the software package manager in Mandriva, I can, of course, download any available programs that I might want. However, these programs get downloaded to the root partition, seemingly by default

It's early days yet, but I can see that I could easily run out of space for programs on root in the not too distant future. My root partiton has a capacity of 5.8 GBs and 39.6% of it has been used (mainly by programs) leaving 3.5 GBs of free space.

I have so much space in my 'Home' folder (66.4 GBs) that it seems a shame not to be making more practical use of it, as any further data that I might want to put on it would only small amount of disk space.

DavidNW said:

It's early days yet, but I can see that I could easily run out of space for programs on root in the not too distant future. My root partiton has a capacity of 5.8 GBs and 39.6% of it has been used (mainly by programs) leaving 3.5 GBs of free space.

I have so much space in my 'Home' folder (66.4 GBs) that it seems a shame not to be making more practical use of it, as any further data that I might want to put on it would only small amount of disk space.

Click to expand...

you need to decide how much space to distribte accross your partitions, to resize existing partitions (ext3) you will make partition unbootable, to successfully resize a bootable ext3 you need to make a bootable floppy (backup of MBR) then when resizing done you need to restore the MBR, to make system bootable (could tell yo how to do it in DOS, but don't know about mandriva (there probably is some partition resizeing software for linux)

Edit: if it were me, i'd resize partitions with bootable CD (parrtition expert 2k3) then reinstall LILO with mandriva CD

Thanks, Dave.

I'll checkput those options. I'm sure there will be a satisfactory workround.

I might be misunderstanding the problem here but..

In all package managers that I have dealt with (4 or 5) the manager downloads packages to somewhere in the root partition because this is also where they are installed (this is the unix way). Once installed those downloaded packages are no longer needed unless you want to reinstall them later (not common even on dial up). I am not familiar with mandriva's package manager but in all other package managers that I have used there is an option to "CLEAN" the download and setup files (in other words delete the trash). Maybe it is called something else in mandriva but it should have some option to get rid of excess dowloaded baggage. You do not need to waste space with these dowloaded packages.

Again, I have no experience with mandriva so this post could be garbage. Fair warning.

urpmi keeps a cache while it's downloading and installing the rpms, but as far as I know it doesn't keep them any more unless its needed. Very rare cases have I seen where there's anything in the /var/cache/urpmi directory.

Yes, I've checked in my /var/cache/urpmi directory and it's empty. So, guys, are you saying that I could somehow delete all the progran files on my root partiton to free up space? I'm thinking that this would make the programs unexecutable - or perhaps I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick...

To recap, the basis of my orginal question is that all downloaded programs seem to get installed on the root partition, which has rather limited space due to the way the installation was setup, i.e., I let the Mandriva installer auto-select partion sizes, which left me with a 5.8 GB root partition (where programs get installed by default. With the benefit of hindsight, I might have been better of doing a custom install, where I could have determined my own partition sizes.

In short, the situation that I find myself in now, is that I have 66.4 GBs of free space on my 'Home' partition doing virtually nothing and a root partition that is relatively far more taken up with program files. Given the aforementioned scenario, it just does not seem to be a logical utilization of so much available free space.

I see the problem now.

It is necessary for linux to install programs into the root drive, if the /usr is on that root partition. All user software is installed into the /usr directory somewhere, but I am not familiar with mandriva enought to say for sure where it installs this stuff. Sometimes people will make the /usr its own partition but that is not necessary on a desktop machine and I don't think that at this stage you could do that without reinstalling the OS. Maybe its worth a shot but I wouldn't recommend it.

Best thing to do would be shrink the home partition and resize the root partition. You can do this with the gparted liveCD or maybe there is that capability inside of mandriva.

Best of luck

Best thing to do would be shrink the home partition and resize the root partition. You can do this with the gparted liveCD or maybe there is that capability inside of mandriva.

Best of luck[/QUOTE]

Thanks very much - that explains things clearly. Do I take it that if I use the gparted liveCD to do the resizing, I will likely not lose any existing data or harm the install? Still, I have a full system backup if things go wrong, so, no sweat, I guess.