bob jones wrote:
>
> Thanks in advance ... I'm at a loss on this one
HOORAY FOR MAILING LISTS!
sorry for the noise but i'm in chicago, we got dumped on today, and i'm a little
punchy.
> Running RHL 6.2 on an Intel 486 with 32MB RAM and plenty of disk space.
> Trying to install tetex-1.0.6-11.i386.rpm, I get the message:
>
> "installing package tetex-1.0.6-11 needs 2Mb on the / filesystem"
[snip]
> I *think* that I have 29Mb available on /. Is that wrong?
No, that's right, give or take a bit.
> Could I make the space on /dev/sda2 available to /? Would mounting
> /dev/sda2 on / do that?
Sure, but it would also break your system, unless you take the proper measures
beforehand, and those measures are extensive enough that you might be better off
reinstalling, or at least moving something other than /.
I notice that your / filesystem also appears to include lots of stuff that I
usually give a partition to, and which would be much easier to migrate. For
example, /usr is often a large chunk of any system, and is probably where most of
TeTeX is is trying to install. It's also a much easier chunk of the filesystem
to migrate than the root is (no device nodes to worry about, for one thing).
Here's how I'd go about moving /usr:
[standard caveats about checking your backups go here; this is less risky than
moving / but you could still leave your machine in an unusable state if this goes
wrong. also be sure you read and understand all this before you start typing
commands, as it might not solve your problem; explanation below.]
Say you want to put it in /dev/sda2, now /build. First make sure /build really
is empty, then
cd /usr
tar czf /build/usr.tgz . [<-- note trailing dot]
[chunk...chunk... chunk...]
cd /build
tar xzf usr.tgz
[chunk... chunk... chunk...]
Hopefully there's enough space in your /build filesystem for both /usr and the
tarball; if not then you'll need to get creative. /usr might be safe to transer
using "cp -rp", but tar is generally more thorough.
Then edit your /etc/fstab, changing /build to /usr.
Then reboot and test. If all goes well (be sure!), you can get rid of what's now
in /usr.
Reboot again, but at the lilo: prompt enter "linux single", assuming that "linux"
is the boot label that you generally use.
When you get the prompt:
umount /usr
cd /usr
ls -l
[you should see all the stuff that lives in /usr even though /usr is unmounted;
this is your old /usr directory which still contains everything it did before,
and you won't have any new free space in / until these bytes get marked free.]
cd /
rm -rf /usr/*
mount /usr
If all that goes well, exit from single user mode and you should have a lot more
space available.
NOW: this might not have helped. Since most the big chunks of your system
probably live in /usr anyhow, you may have just moved the problem rather than
solving it. You'll probably end up with lots of space in / and not much in /usr,
so tetex might now refuse to install with insufficent space in the /usr
filesystem; if it does install you may find that /usr is almost full while / is
largely unused.
To fix this situation more generally, what I'd do is reinstall the OS with a
different partitioning scheme. / should be small. /usr should be a separate
partition, as big as you can spare. I also like to have /var and /tmp separate
from the rest of the root filesystem (automated processes shouldn't write to / if
you can help it) but when space is short you don't always have that option.
I don't know why so many people these days seem to want /boot in its own
partition, particularly for a single-user box; in your case I'd leave it as part
of /.
My .02 [this package priced by worth, not by volume ;) ], hope it helps somehow.
-m
--
Michael Jinks, IB // Technical Entity // Saecos Corporation
"No one speaks English and everything's broken." -- T. Waits
"Tom Waits would have made a decent sysadmin." -- M. Jinks
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