Out of the frying pan...

[John]

I just keep painting myself into corners, and I'm hoping that people
can point out some (presumably dumb) things that I am doing, and
recommend a course of action that will get me back to where I want
to be.

I have a Compaq Armada M700 on which I had installed FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE
(as of February, 2004) and life was pretty good.  There were a few
annoyance, but it was a useful working environment.  I didn't have
Java running, I probably needed to find a better browser than Konqeror,
and the sound, touch-pad, and suspend/resume functions didn't work,
so there were things I would have liked to have improved.

All that changed when I tried to install Win98SE in the lower
partition I had reserved for that purpose.  It totally trashed my
/ (with /usr) filesystem, though leaving /home (and /var) alone.
[ I bit the bullet and bought Windows XP Home, which installed
fine - but that's for my kids - I want my FreeBSD! ]

This seemed like a good time to move forward.  I had a set of 5.2.1
CD's, so I installed them.

Things didn't work very well.  Part of it was ACPI problems I didn't
correctly recognize, but my biggest problem was that I couldn't get
OpenOffice to install, because it had moved to Xorg from XFree86,
along with FreeBSD 5.3.

I had a slower, desktop machine with a plenty of disk space, so
I loaded up the source distribution from 5.2.1, cvsup'ed to -STABLE,
did a buildworld, buildkernel, mounted /usr/src and /usr/obj via
NFS, and upgraded the laptop to 5.3.  Since then, I've been playing
a challenging game of "update the package" to try to get all the
requisite packages for Xorg and kde in place (not to mention OpenOffice,
and I'm not even there yet).

Have you already guessed my problem?  My / and /usr single filesystem,
which is 1.5Gb in size, that had been about 80% full with XFree86,
kde, fvwm, and OpenOffice is now 101% full and I haven't even gotten
all of kde installed (and all the dependent packages), let alone
OpenOffice.

I see my options as this:
1) Try to figure out the dependency trees for kde, install kde-lite
   instead, and rip out the packages I don't need (theoretically
   possible - but feasible?)
2) Back up /home, reinstall a minimum 5.2.1 system, do the installworld
   and installkernel again, and then do the install of the kde (or
   kde-lite) then restore /home (but how much larger do I need to
   make / and /usr?)
3) Buy or build a 5.3 installation set, and redo the installation,
   using only the distributions I need, and hope it fits.

Other suggestions?  Anything obvious I'm missing?  You folks have been
extrememly helpful so far, so I'm hoping there's a good solution I'm
just missing!
-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG