Mageia forum

I tried to use K3b to copy a DVD and it says that I don't have room in my temp file. Why? I've never had this happen before. How do you copy with K3b in Mageia with this kind of limited temp file?

Also: why do you have the /home so small? it's only set to 12GB. How about making it 25GB?

The partition layouts are based on the amount of room available where you are setting up mageia.

Again this post gives us so little to go on and assumes that the people who put mageia together are responcible, but i suspect you setup you mageia, and so the choices of what sizes are down to you.

Mageia needs about 15 gig or so for root, about 2 gig for swap the rest is allocated to /home and is stored in a seperate partition so that upgrades and reformats of root done loose your personal data.

Therefore if you only allocated 30 gig for your mageia install thats what you get.

My home size is 90 gig because i installed it on a 120 gig disk.

So please let us see what you are seeing if you want helf, an fdisk -l and a df -k perhaps a mount or a copy of /etc/fstab will help.

I suspect that you dont have enough room where k3b creates the temp backup,

Apologies for typos, posting on tablet

Regards peter

By default k3b uses ~/tmp/kde-yourusername/ as a temporary folder (~ means your home directory)

You can change this in k3b setup to /tmp for example if you have sufficient space in your root partition.

As wintpe pointed out the size of the /home partition was under your control when you installed Mageia. If you let the installer do an auto partition it would have allocated all the spare space to /home after allowing sufficient space for the root partition.
If you would like to change the size of the /home partition it is easy enough to do so long as you have sufficient space on your disc of course.

If you would like instructions to resize your /home partition please open a new question.

You don't say if you have Windows on it. I have a laptop setup with Win7 and Mageia2 on a 500 GB drive.

My partitions look like this:

C: 352GB NTFS (Win7) | 30GB(/) | 4GB(swap) |66.80GB (home)|

I am in Win7 now looking at this from windows. I think I "Cut out" like 100 GB at the end of the win7 partition.

I used this free program that seems to work well and has never trashed a Win partition for me: http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

There is a Toshiba backup/restore partition on there that I left out and that is why the numbers do not add up.

Basically, adjust the Win Part to 350GB, then install linux and set / to 30GB, swap to 4GB and home to the rest, like 68.

Without windows you have to delete(I delete them) the partitions mageia makes and recreate/resize them. Choose custom. If you have no windows then you have nothing to loose I guess. You can resize one, but there has to be room, so I just delete /,swap and /home and then create /30GB then swap4GB and use the rest for home??GB.

Since I really don't know your experience, setup and other info it is hard to explain, but pretty straight forward once you understand it.

Example: on a 320 GB: resize win to 210, then boot and install linux and choose custom, then create, do /30GB swap4GB and home?? what is left then continue.

Some say swap should match actual RAM and I guess way back it really mattered. I didn't want to do it over so I gave it 4GB swap just in case I want to run "everything at once" just to see what happens.

If you do have Windows installed the size of home can be smaller and just use your music/videos from the Win side....don't move it all to Linux.

To reinstall, I copy home to the Win partition and then just go, then drag my docs, music, pics and downloads back from the Win partition. That way I have no left over setting in home, as I format it too.

yankee495

re swap and a little off topic , but since you mensioned it

as you rightly indicated , it used to be upto 3 times memory way back when systems had 4 meg of ram, and 80 meg disks

(and yes i realy do mean 4 meg of ram to run Sunos 4 and applications in).

but the systems im working with now have between 96 and 128 gig of ram, and so that would be a terrible wast of the 146 or 300 gig scsi disks

that they are installed with, if we allocated that much swap.

with 4 gig of ram, 4 gig of swap is more than enough , and depending on what you are using the system for could be trimmed, to say 1 or 2 gig, if you are tight on space.

(I say depends , as somepeople dont run hundreds of windows on there systems, and even if you do, that does not mean hundreds of copys of the program in memory, as the kernel will make effecient use of ram and not load each instance of say firefox a different program space.

so if your lucky enought to have 16 gig of ram in your desktop (becomming more of a requirment if you bought this PC to run windows) then its likly you wont actualy ever use swap, (well the next 4 mageia distributions at least) and can allocate a small amount for it.

regards peter

So If I resize the root partition to 50GB (on a 250GB drive) that should solve this problem. Mageia 2 was installed on a new hdd.

Code: Select all

[davek@localhost ~]$ df -k
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs          12548756  4164172   7754936  35% /
devtmpfs         1538008        0   1538008   0% /dev
tmpfs            1543452     1372   1542080   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            1543452      756   1542696   1% /run
/dev/sda1       12548756  4164172   7754936  35% /
tmpfs            1543452        0   1543452   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda6      227233020 15837208 211395812   7% /home

Tried to use parted magic but because of the way the partitions are broken up I could not enlarge the / partition or shrink the /home partition. How can I resize the / so it's 50GB ?

Quote

Also: why do you have the /home so small? it's only set to 12GB. How about making it 25GB?

211395812k = 211 gig not 12G

or was this after partition magic.

if this is the case, i cant guess how it was that way unless you did it yourself.

As for resizing root, thats not easy as you will have to move swap and /home and in doing so will overwrite them.

there are ways to backup /home, re-lable the disk with new partition layouts and then use resize2fs to extend the root fs to fill out the new space.

then restore /home , at least thats how id do it, maybe someone has a clever tool that does all that, but thinking about it, they would have to do those steps, as

the repartioning would overwrite most of your data in /home.

all this has to be done while booted from a rescue mode CD or disk

but it may just be simpler to reload from scratch.

why not just fix where k3b backs up the image to, ie your home you have enough space there

in fact with enough space there im not sure where this thread started from. maybe you misread the error in the first place.

regards peter

I guess the easiest way to handle this is to point K3b to a tmp file in the home partition.

I just wonder why when I installed Mageia and it sees that I have a 250GB hdd, that the default root partition would be a larger one to begin with, or as other distros do, give the option to have one large partition or you do a custon partitioning to have whatever partitions you want. For people like me, one large partition is fine. I don't have the need for extra partitions that may improve things or not. This is one thing that should have been changed from the Mandriva installer. Maybe with Mageia 3 there will be a new installer that will give you those choices.

yes theres custom partitioning for those that know exactly what they are doing (or want) and theres just do it
for those who dont have a clue what partitioning is, who maybe new to linux, and want the simplest way to get it up and running
so they can play.

a couple of rules, conventions you might want to think about

/home is sperate for a good reason, it gets written to the most and is therefore the most likly to have a coruption, and so should be seperate from root.

root is sperate from home connversly so when you do an upgrade you dont have to backup the entire /home partition.

swap is usualy put in between as its convinient and a throuwback to the days when we tried to keep swap at the front of the disk.

you can have one big root and swap at the end, but you will kick yourself next time theres a reason to re-install your system.


regards peter

Tried to use parted magic but because of the way the partitions are broken up I could not enlarge the / partition or shrink the /home partition. How can I resize the / so it's 50GB ?

I am not familiar with parted magic, but you can do what you need using Mageia's own disc partitioning tool diskdrake in the Mgeia Control Centre.

It is impossible to resize a partition while it is in use. So if you want to resize '/' you have two options.
The first is to boot up in a Live CD and perform the resizing on an unmounted partition.

The second option is to create a new partition and mount it on a folder under /.
So for example you could mount a new partition under /usr/bin (I use that example because it holds a lot of files.) When you use diskdrake it is smart enough to recognise that there are a whole bunch of files already in /usr/bin and it will offer to move them to the new partition for you and so free up a bunch of space on the old partition. This can all be done on a live system.

Now as for resizing /home you either have to do it in a Live CD, or else you have to log into your computer as root user so that the /home partition is not in use.
Now Mageia tries to make logging in as root user as hard as possible. Logging in as root is a bad idea. (If you do not know why just Google it.) Ordinarily Mageia will not let you log in as root so what you have to do is :-

1/ Log Out
2/ Hit Ctl+Alt+F1 to get a Console. Log in as root
3/ Give the command 'service dm stop' to kill the existing X session.
4/ Give the command 'startx' to log in as root using the IceWM desktop.
5/ Use diskdrake to resize the /home partition
6/ Log out and then give the command 'service dm start'
7/ You will be returned to a graphical login.

As always when playing with disc partitions backup all essential data before you start.