Hi folks.....my distro of choice is Slackware , this is the one i am most familiar with.Having said that i also like to tinker and explore other distros.

I have a spare drive on which i installed mandriva one from the linux magazine ,may 2006 (this is how i got the dvd).

Installation went fine and everything works great....i have searched some on the web and this site for an answer to my question = my installation took 11G of space from my 20G drive...did i do something wrong ? or is this normal ?

Something i am not familiar with = in /home dir , there is a guest account (212M) .

I have tried the following command ( with variations , CD instead o f DVD ,here is the output of this ;

[root@du339 guest]# urpmi.removemedia Installation Free DVD
essai de sélection du média inexistant « Installation »
essai de sélection du média inexistant « Free »
essai de sélection du média inexistant « DVD »
examen de la liste de synthèse [/var/lib/urpmi/synthesis.hdlist.update_source.c

Sorry the install is in french ,the gist of this being "there is no such media .
For those familiar with mandriva i am sure you have an answer to my question and i thank you in advance
nutronix

You could always du -S | sort -n to see which directories are the largest and then just ls -al to see which files are eating space.

Or I just found this one on google, cd to / and run as root user find . -printf '%s %p\n'|sort -nr|head -20 will give you the largest 20 files with their file size in bytes.

Thank you pljvaldez , here is the output of the second command you suggested ;

[root@du339 ~]# find . -printf '%s %p\n'|sort -nr|head -20
599585 ./drakx/ddebug.log
130634 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/compreg.dat
123585 ./drakx/install.log
78786 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/xpti.dat
33704 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/mozilla-powerpackplus.html
33218 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/mozilla-powerpack.html
31406 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/mozilla-discovery-download.html
25632 ./drakx/auto_inst.cfg.pl
16150 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/bookmarks.html
5299 ./.fonts.cache-1
4096 ./.xauth
4096 ./tmp
4096 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/extensions/{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}
4096 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/extensions
4096 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default/chrome
4096 ./.mozilla/firefox/jb2pwfv3.default
4096 ./.mozilla/firefox
4096 ./.mozilla
4096 ./.inspect_tmp_dir
4096 ./.gstreamer-0.8
[root@du339 ~]# cd /
[root@du339 /]# find . -printf '%s %p\n'|sort -nr|head -20
find: ./proc/11991/task/11991/fd/4: Aucun fichier ou répertoire de ce type
find: ./proc/11991/fd/4: Aucun fichier ou répertoire de ce type
536809472 ./proc/kcore
179321491 ./usr/share/games/nexuiz/data/data20060214.pk3
134217728 ./sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:02:00.1/resource0
134217728 ./sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:02:00.0/resource0
89837568 ./var/lib/rpm/Packages
67108864 ./sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:00.0/resource0
62257600 ./usr/lib/aspell-0.60/pl.rws
53833728 ./usr/lib/aspell/fi.rws
40832848 ./usr/lib/aspell-0.60/it.rws
33016468 ./usr/share/games/warzone2100/warzone.wdg
25981168 ./usr/lib/aspell-0.60/bg.rws
25822464 ./usr/lib/aspell-0.60/be-common.rws
24646368 ./usr/lib/aspell-0.60/mt.rws
22675504 ./usr/lib/aspell-0.60/sl.rws
22487984 ./usr/lib/aspell-0.60/br.rws
20983808 ./var/lib/rpm/Filemd5s
19722240 ./var/lib/rpm/Basenames
19373183 ./root/tmp/sortXlnmt9
18982188 ./usr/include/c++/4.0.1/i586-mandriva-linux-gnu/bits/stdc++.h.gch/O2g.gch
18760956 ./usr/include/c++/4.0.1/i586-mandriva-linux-gnu/bits/stdc++.h.gch/O0g.gch
[root@du339 /]#

kind of heavy to sort through is it not ? Just wondering if other mandriva users experienced the same.......thanks again

Mandriva One has just become public in the last few days. Also there is no DVD version officially at least none that I know of.
Here's the mirror list for One.
So what you used is most likely a modified version of beta 3.
Live CDs\DVDs are using a compressed file system called squashfs so e.g. a live CD can hold 2G of software hence the installation size.

Well i got this one DVD with Linux Magazine's May issue...it might not be the latest , who knows ,kernel 2.6.12-17mdk-i586-up-1GB ( this is what i get when i do uname -r ).

2.6.12-17mdk that's definitely not the latest.