[Techtalk] Making room for Oracle

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

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.

You can control this by selecting other options at install time (or even
choosing the custom install option and selecting individual packages).
The Red Hat installer usually shows how much space is required somewhere
on the screen (although I rarely use their canned install options, so
I'm not 100% sure what they do there).

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

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).

Malcolm

-- 
Always try to be modest and be proud of it!