by djennings » Jan 13th, '12, 16:14
During installation it offers the choice of reusing the existing partitions, automatic partitions, or custom partitions.
If automatic is selected it will make a root partition large enough for an average desktop and leave the remainder as /home. There is no point having the root partition too large you would never be able to use the space.
My root partition is 12 GB and I have quite a lot of applications installed.
The command 'df' in a console will show you how much space you have left.
If you think the root partition is too small your choices are :-
Reinstall using custom partitioning. That way you can keep your existing /home with all its files, but resize it to free up space.
Resize your existing partitions. There are two ways to do this. One is to log in using a LiveCD resize the partitions and then rewrite the fstab file and grub menu to reflect the changes.
The other is to log in as root in your existing system, resize the home partition and use the space freed up to create new partitions such as /var or /usr/share. The partitioning tool in Mageia Control Centre is smart enough to move all files in those folders to the new partitions for you. (You cannot do this while logged in as a regular user because your /home cannot be resized while it is being used)
Which you do depends on how comfortable you feel about being able to recover if it goes wrong.