[NTLUG:Discuss] Kubuntu upgrade question

[Wayne Dahl]

Never saw this show up on the list, not sure why...but resending...

This may be a stupid question, but every time I do something involving
partitioning a hard drive, I never seem to get /var big enough and I
have problems later...like, is there a way to tell Adept or Synaptic to
download upgrade files to a different directory than /var/****?  I
increased /var to 2.9Gigs last time I had to partition my hard drives
(when I installed a new 300Gig SATA drive) and again, I find it's not
enough.  I'm attempting to upgrade my AMD64 box from Kubuntu 5.10 Breezy
Badger to Dapper Drake.  I've got all the repostories set up, started
the upgrade, Adept happily started downloading files and I went to watch
TV.  I came back later to find it had SIGSEV'd, so I started it again
and went back to watching TV.  When I checked it later, Adept had
crashed again.  I tried to restart it, it attempted to download 1 file
and crashed.  I tried Synaptic, thinking it was something I had done to
Adept, it crashed too.  I went back to Adept trying to see which file it
was crashing on, never could...when it hit me.  I checked /var to find
it was full.

Now, I have over 130Gigs of available space on /usr and I would REALLY
like to have Adept download the files to a directory there where I have
plenty of space instead of /var, where I don't.  Any ideas other than
repartitioning my HD's and reinstalling?  I might do that anyway, but
I'd like to see if there's another way to do this.

After sending the above message, I turned off that machine and now I
have a much bigger problem.  I'm assuming the issue is that since /var
is full, when the machine attempts to start the MySQL daemon, it fails
and the machine stops the boot sequence and hangs.  I've attempted to
boot the machine with the live CD I installed the OS from originally,
but didn't have much time to deal with it and didn't see the filesystem
on the hard drive (I'm assuming the fstab would need to be modified to
access the hard drive to try removing those packages from /var to create
some space so the machine will finish booting up) and maybe I'm
completely barking up the wrong tree.  The machine boots up just fine
from the live CD, but like I said, at the time, I didn't have much time
to try messing with it.

Any ideas/help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Wayne