[Techtalk] Making room for Oracle

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 09:40:57AM +1100 or thereabouts, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 09:22:29AM -0800, Arashi wrote:
> > I've decided to stick with RH 8 exclusively instead of dual booting
> > it with Mandrake and I want to install Oracle database from the
> > download files.  The problem is that unlike before, I can't download
> > Oracle because there isn't enough space. The file sizes are 400MB,
> > 600MB, 80MB but free space in RH seems to be about 150MB for each
> > directory.
> 
> I assume you mean "partition" here, not directory. The lines that show
> up when you run, for example, "df" are for each partition on your
> drives.
> 
> > Can anyone explain why RH does this? I had lots more free
> > space when I was using Mandrake - where did it go?  
> 
> It depends very much on which install option you chose. All that's
> happened is that Red Hat has installed more packages than in the
> Mandrake install you did. Different distributions have (vastly)
> different ideas of what should go in a basic installation.

I don't have the original mail to hand now. But I wonder whether
you have lots of space but it is split up between a bunch of 
different partitions. I have met this problem before.
> 
> If you want to try and find some more space without reinstalling, you
> can look for big packages that you don't use. Run something like
> 
> 	rpm -qa --queryformat "%10{SIZE} %20{NAME}\n" | sort -rn

Wow! I would add "| less" or " > filename" at the end. Without
this, unless you have a massive scrollback, the real biggies will
scroll off the top of the screen and out of scrollback.

Looking at this, my top ten are:

 127943487      openoffice-libs
 116925171      openoffice-i18n
  79821438           openoffice
  67919588             festival
  62915328         rpmdb-redhat
  59956168           kernel-uml
  57304728                 Omni
  48558928            tetex-doc
  40496847         glibc-common
  37628264           ttfonts-ko

I knew OpenOffice was a pig :) Note that many of these are not
in the default installs of RH. Now I realise why! Festival is
an app which talks at you. rpmdb-redhat is a database of all
the rpms on the distro so you can query it and find out dependencies
and stuff. kernel-uml is for user-mode Linux, which lets you
run more Linux instances inside your Linux box: I currently have
a Debian install on my RH box through this. tetex-doc is another
"not installed by default cos it's massive". And yes, then we
have glibc...

> which will list all the installed rpms on your system in order of size
> (largest to smallest). Then run down the names and see if you can
> usefully delete some of them (but please be careful: I explained this to
> somebody else a while back and they deleted glibc, claiming that they
> didn't want any GNOME stuff and they got confused between glib and
> glibc. They had to use hammers to force glibc to be uninstalled, but
> they got there in the end, much to their subsequent disappointment).

Ouch.

I am continually typo'ing one of those when I mean the other.
But luckily, I check, because I know I am prone to that. I have
absolutely no idea how I would recover from deleting glibc.
About the only program I can think of which is -not- linked 
against it is 'sash': a stand-alone shell which is statically
linked specifically for those occasions when you manage to 
delete some vital library. I don't go as far as those people
who make it the default root shell. But I do always put it
on the machine. Just in case!

Telsa