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I just did a fresh installation of Fedora on VirtualBox - gave it 8GB of hard drive space. After installing a handful of packages via yum (and nothing more) I am getting the error:

Insufficient space in download directory

I'm new to VirtualBox and wanted to know if there is something I can do to avoid this. Should I have dedicated more than 8GB to the instance? (BTW, I tried both settings of allocating a static 8GB and allocating an expandable space with an 8GB max)

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What does df -h show? – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Mar 2 '11 at 1:37
varcacheyum fills up 100% when trying to install a large package Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/live-rw 3.0G 2.0G 955M 69% / tmpfs 249M 112K 249M 1% /dev/shm varcacheyum 249M 0 249M 0% /var/cache/yum /tmp 249M 16K 249M 1% /tmp vartmp 249M 0 249M 0% /var/tmp – rlflow Mar 5 '11 at 1:07

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Here are some options:

  • Delete some packages you aren't using via yum remove. You can get a list of packages via rpm -qa | less.
  • Maybe there are some RPM files you don't need, try df -h then yum clean all then df -h again to see if that cleared up a lot of space.
  • You can probably increase the disc space. This depends on your exact partitioning scheme and whether you're using LVM, so this often is more of an "experts" option. With "gparted" you can do this without much pain, but you'll need to boot into a "gparted" bootable image to do the resize, or you can manually use fsck, pvresize, lvresize, resize2fs, etc... If all of this sounds greek to you, it might be "bighting off more than you can chew".
  • If you don't have much on the virtual system yet, the easy way would be just to re-install with a bigger disc image.
  • If you are trying to install a bunch of packages, try splitting it up into installing them one at a time. You need two copies of things while doing the install, , the downloaded and the installed, so doing it in smaller chunks and doing a yum clean all between them can give you the breathing room you need.
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Thanks. I creating a new VM with a bigger disc size but varcacheyum still runs out of space. It looks like it only has 249M. – rlflow Mar 5 '11 at 1:12
Don't put /var on it's own file-system. Make it a part of the / file-system. You can copy /var to the root file-system but you'd probably best do it in single-user mode. Make sure /etc/fstab no longer mounts /var once you've done the copy. – Sean Reifschneider Mar 7 '11 at 3:11
up vote 0 down vote

you are still loading from your live cd; Unmount it

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