Compiling and diskspace usage

[IMQ]

Hello guys & gals,

I just installed SL 3.2 MiniEdtion and have a couple questions.

I installed additional packages such as kaffeine, mplayer-plugin, etc. Then I installed OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 and it took a long, long time to complete on my PC, AMD Athlon 2500+ with 1GB of RAM and a 256-MB Radeon 9600 Pro.

However, I noticed that after the complete install of OpenOffice.org, the disk space usage jump up to 6.1GB!

What gives?

Is installing addition packages going to suck up huge amount of disk space?

The MiniEdition is installed on a 20GB partition. I also have SL 3.2 DVD edition on another 20GB partition but it only took up roughly 8GB of disk space. And it has a whole lot more stuff installed than the Mini edition. GNOME, Xfce, etc.

I don't get it. Where does all the diskspace usage go to?

Here is my thinking: most single LiveCD installed to HD takes up roughly 2GB of diskspace. Maybe 2.5GB at most. So how did installing addition packages such as kaffeine, mplayer-plugin, OpenOffice.org more than double the diskspace usage? I noticed that when installing mplayer-plugin, the system also installed some dependencies, I guess, as well as Sun JDK, and compiling Firefox.

I am really baffled at this issue.

Are there stuff that I can clean up to recover the diskspace? Like source packages?

Thanks!

PS: I am really new to Gentoo-based distros. So don't be hard on me if my questions seem obvious to many experience Gentoo/SL users.

[cvill64]

OO.o is a large package, but diskspace is being taken up by the downloaded files, so clean out your distfiles every now and then

# rm -rf /usr/portage/distfiles/*

[IMQ]

cvill64,

Thanks for the tips.