on the nature of updates
 

i recently installed opensuse 11 on my notebook and for the first time everything seems to work exactly as it should (had 9.1, 9.3, 10.1 before; have not started with the multimedia-installations yet). since i had so much trouble with linux - conversion was always an issue, i do a lot of work on photos and i couldn't install software in 10.1 for the last year or so - i decided to change the power balance to a large windows-partition and a smaller linux-partition. but it turned out that opensuse 11 expands a lot, i have only 1.3gb left. is this due to updates? i thought an update would replace stuff, not necessary expand a system. where do i start deleting unnecessary files? :)

best regards
ungua

Instead of deleting files, first uninstall unneeded packages using YaST2. You may have both KDE4 and KDE3.5 installed.

You could examine how much space is taken up by directories with:
sudo du -hs * 2>/dev/null | grep '^[[:digit:]]*M'

The grep filter will just show directories containing over 10M.

You can safely delete anything in /tmp before shutting down. You can configure SuSE to do that every time you shutdown. (YaST2 -> /etc/sysconfig editor) or "kdesu yast2 sysconfig".

If you have kerry beagle installed, it may have around 100M of cache in /var/cache/beagle/. I think you can delete the contents.

Also look at logs in /var/log/. The ones ending in *.gz are backups and can be deleted. If you run mysql, look in /var/lib/mysql/. There may be archived logfiles there as well.

There may be old system file backups as well if your system is configured to backup /etc/sysconfig/.

You may be able to delete 100M-1G from /usr/share/doc/.

thank you for your extensive answer!

in /etc/sysconfig i only find "cron" with tmp-time already set to 0. i guess this means everything is deleted on shutdown or startup?

did i misunderstand something with the filesizes-command? (screenshot)

kde4 is deleted.

best regards!
ungua

You could use [0-9]* instead of [[:digit:]]*. You don't need the grep pipe. I just used it to filter out smaller numbers.