I've been trying to install gnome (so I can install Mozilla), but I get "file system full" error when I gunzip. I'm a Solaris novice - bought the box on eBay so I could teach myself Solaris and the SPARC platform. I've deleted what I know I can delete and tried again, but get the same error - this time at:
tar: GtkHRuler.html. I didn't write down where I failed the first try, but I had freed up a fair amount of space, so hopefully I got farther although still not far enough.

I know how to defrag and look at disk space availability in Windows - is there a way to do this in Solaris?

Is there some notorious space hog in the default Solaris installation that I could delete?

Thanks,
Mark

What is the size of your drive and how is it partitioned ? What is the output of

df -k

unix operating systems normally keep up with fragmention without user input with the fsck that is run at boot time.

You can locate files by size with the find command. man find will give you more details.

find / -type f -size +10000000 -exec ls -l {} \;

# df -k
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on

/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 1695319 1549760 94700 95% /

/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc

mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab

fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd

swap 859472 40 859432 1% /var/run

swap 859744 312 859432 1% /tmp

/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7 1856319 9 1800621 1% /export/home
#

(1) I'll have to see if I can find any notes before I crack open the case - I don't remember HD size and I don't know how to query Solaris about this.
(2) I don't recall setting up any partitions (I know how to use them in windows and didn't have any reason to want more than one).
(3) The find command you provided, after the hard drive looked for a few minutes, just returned with a command prompt.

I appreciate your thoughts so far. Any other tips?

Your df -k output tells me you probably have a 2 gb drive. You can pick what options you want to install and trim the space requirements but 2 gb is very small. I don't know why you would need to install gnome since it already has cde as a window manager. A unix host is often partitioned for reliability to separate the operating system on / from the areas that would have lots of disk activity. If, for example you were running a mail server and the /var directory might swell by several gig, it would make sence to have /var as it's own partiton. Then when you receive more mail than you expect, the operating system is not damaged and at worse you delay mail delivery.