Hi there!

Have finally had time to tinker with my OS and this time around it amounted to the glorious installation of almighty gentoo. Wasn't as hard as I imagined it to be either - although some concepts were indeed alien to me who has never touched portage before (USE-flags were OK as soon as I found out how they could be set on per-app level :-P ).

But I digress. I thought gentoo was supposed to be a rather lean distro with as little fluff as possible and therefore expected the installation size to be if not small, then at least reasonable. What I have ended up with though is a HUGE install for no particular reason.

I have barely installed KDE and gnome and I already ended up with a whopping 12GB of used space. I have absolutely NO idea as to why that is.

Anyone has any piece of advice for me? Some kind of a clean command maybe? (in style of apt-get clean)

Welcome to Gentoo :-)
I haven't actually checked the size of my installation. For a start, shouldn't you choose between KDE and Gnome, some space is already lost there. I found a huge improvement in runtime speed when I moved to Gentoo, disk space is anyway relatively cheep so hasn't bothered me.
There are some clean options in emerge (check the man pages), although be slightly careful with some of them. There are uses like: "emerge --depclean" which might cause you to have to run "revdep-rebuild". Check the user manual on the Gentoo site on how to use this (and one of my favourites: "emerge -DNua world")

Otherwise you can also check where the disk is used with e.g. the du command.

Gentoo is, as they say, a meta distribution, so you will learn lots about Linux by using it. You are effectively building up your own distro, only a small(ish) step up from Linux From Scratch.

Another thing, not mentioned so often, is that (for me anyway) its easier to run "emerge -DNua world" from time to time, then to upgrade to your distro's half yearly new release.

Thanks!

Well, sure, but I have a kind of a nasty habit of running apps from both environments in Openbox

That was sort of my second question. I was rather shocked to find out that my nVidia 8800GT ran only at about 12-14k fps with glxgears while my Ubuntu distro with precompiled stock nvidia driver is doing about 21k. Have no idea why.

Yeah, and I think there is "emerge --clean" too, but AFAIK both those commands remove unused apps. What I want is to clear some space without touching installed software.


Basically it boils down to:

Oh, yeah. Remember I tried LFS 2 years ago, but I remember encountering some kind lib conflict not mentioned in the instructions pretty early on. And I, not having patience to sort it out completely, had to reinstall Arch (which I was using at the time) after 2 days of fruitless attempts at fixing the issue.

Welcome!

kde and gnome?
The meta-packages - which pull in every possible program there is for these environments?
Which themselves have - of course - yet other dependencies to be able to build (and use) them...
And you wonder why it is not a lean install?

Take that into account when wondering - as well as all the sources needed to build.
Are these also still present?

Gentoo installs not only the binaries as other distros do - it installs all the needed headers too - you need those to be able to build...

Also the size of your install depends heavily on what USE-Flags you chose.

You probably now have have multiple versions of qt for instance - and multiple versions of gtk - mono, java...
all huge things one barely needs - and which can be avoided - also by setting Flags carefully.

I just finished an installation with basic gnome and xfce and every program I will ever need in mostly at least two versions - qt included - (image-viewer, video and audio apps, wordprocessing, webbrowser cd-burning... the usual stuff and quite a lot more).

It takes up just 4 GB.

I did this for a friend - my own install is a little bigger - 7 GB - but I have played a lot an have a lot of what I'll never need.

You need to become familiar with tose USE-Flags - and check a build before it is done for what other programs it will pull in - often the default will depend on more than you need.

emerge -av will tell you a lot about this
eix is a great tool

A lot of space is used by /usr/portage/distfiles - the sources
More in /var/tmp...

forgot:
a great tool is demerge - which can become handy in case you installed too much, because it can be hard to get rid of all software installed as a dependency to kde for instance.
It is best used before you do major changes or huge installs - makes it easy to revert back.

I wish I had used this on my system - but this system has grown and lived for 3-4 years now.
I did use it on the new system I mentioned and it will make my life with Gentoo even more easy as it is already.

Some good advice from jomen there, I might have a look at some of it.

Just checked my own installation:
/Var being 13G might in parts be caused by an ongoing emerge; just as I run du now, it was still compiling openoffice 2.4.1 that I set off some 8 hours ago (before I went to bed) when I run an "emerge -DNua world" (I have an Athlon XP 3200+ (32 bit)).

For runtime speed, if you haven't already, you might want to check your make.conf flag optimisations. Here's my CFLAGS variable:
I.e. set CPU and optimisation level. Other then that, the xorg.conf file and maybe the kernel options? Not sure about how much is to be gained from the kernel settings. I have tried to remove unnecessary drivers, compile in (rather then modules) things I do need and set the cpu.

I haven't given disk usage much thought, and I do have 300G or so. Runtime it is quiet fast, at least much faster then my old Fedora 8 install. I run Gnome 2.22 and Compiz-fusion 0.7.6 now, and the cube is spinning very comfortably . Glxgears report 18-19k with Firefox-3 and a few other things running (Nvidia 6800GT card).


EDIT: Now that it has finished the emerge the /var size has dropped to 8.2G (still quiet big, but not a problem)

/var/tmp/portage/ is the place where the packages are built - should a package fail to build I noticed that it leaves behind its whole unpacked source tree including all the files created up to the point of failure.

If you go and fix the cause and compile successfully - the mentioned files still are present - can get quite a few GB over time.
I have solved this by removing /var/tmp and putting a symlink to /tmp in its place - /tmp gets wiped on every boot.

There may be some way to tell portage to clean up these old files - but I don't know about it and it works the way I did it...

Hehe, that was my exact same thought when I this afternoon (while searching forums and bug reports for a solution to a specific problem) discovered that there were alternatives to the meta package installation. Sort of too late after spending 5 hours compiling EVERYTHING

Anyways, thanks for your advice I will surely try out demerge


O_O WOW that was... uhm... HUGE. My whole Ubuntu install (stuffed with all kinds of unnecessary apps and libs) is smaller than your "/var" dir. That's just scary

I have a Quad Core (Q9300) Intel CPU which I believe should have -march=nocona, and everything is set correctly in /etc/make.conf as far as I can see at least.

Actually, just remembered I have created a backup directory under /var. I put the zips there before I burn them onto DVD-rws.
the latest set is always there.
If I discount my backup, the /var is actually only 0.6G

So not so big after all

MasterOfTheWind,

/var/portage/distfiles will grow without limit if you allow it. Thats all the sources you downloaded to install your Gentoo. They can be safely removed as they will be fetched again if you need to rebuild something.
To prune /var/portage/distfiles use eclean distfiles.

Also, /var/tmp/portage can get quite big. It fills up with broken emerges over time. You can remove its contents provided emerge is not running.

If you have set FEATURES="buildpkg" your binary packages accumulate in /var/portage/packages eclean packages prunes old ones.

I think that's /usr/portage/distfiles by default, not really sure, however I also put portage under /var for many reasons that are not relevant here.

i92guboj,

Well caught - thanks

In fact, you can run this command to remove the downloaded packages :

Also, are you using ccache, because if you compile a lot of packages, you can endup with a lot of stuff inside /var/tmp/ccache actually.

As mentioned before, /usr/portage/distfiles stores every package that you install and /var/tmp/portage is where packages are compiled. Noticing from your post, /usr/portage is the biggest dir, probably because of /usr/portage/distfiles. You can safely delete its contents if you like (I kept them in another partition, they are useful when something goes wrong and you don't have network connection.)

Also, you should check your use flags for unnecessary stuff, then run emerge --newuse world.