Ok, so running through that forum I decided to try out some of the scripts 
to clean stale distfiles.
The first one (distcleaner-0.0.2) returned a lot of errors. The second (
distmaint.py) was too weird. Finally, (distclean.sh) seemed to be ok, and 
freed 255 MB. I could then end my emerge (eclipse). After the emerge I 
end-up with 805Mb free. 

As you say Holly, this is far from enough if I want to compile something big 
and also maybe for smaller apps. Which means that I have a problem.
In fact, I have a 38GB disk on my laptop. My mistake was that I assumed that 
gentoo was not so space-consuming. Now I'll have to make some modifications, 
redo my partitions. What I would like was to clean once per all my windoz 
partition (9GB)... but from time to time I need it.. unless I find a 
replacement to all the things I need from there.

Anyway, thanks for the replies.
If someone has a nice script to maintain distfiles under control let me 
know. ;)

Cheers,
Fernando.

On 8/7/05, motub@planet.nl <motub@planet.nl> wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Fernando Meira <fmeira@gmail.com>
> Date: Sunday, August 7, 2005 10:22 pm
> Subject: [gentoo-user] how to control portage space usage
> 
> > Hi,
> > this is probably an old discussion, sorry for bring it up again.
> >
> > When I joined Gentoo (a few months ago) I got the idea that I could
> > control
> > very well the space that gentoo would require. That would be great
> > because
> > of my 4.6G available to it. Then, not so long time ago I got very
> > surprised
> > with how much less space available I had when I didn't have
> > (almost)
> > anything installed. Now it's completely full and I'm the middle of
> > an emerge
> > :(
> >
> > Well, tears apart, I would like to know if there's a good way to
> > control the
> > space usage of portage, since it is the reason for my problem.
> > My /usr/portage and /var/tmp/portage/ take 2.2G which is almost
> > half of the
> > partition.
> >
> > What I have installed:
> > - some (split) ebuilds of kde 3.4.1
> > - e16
> > - e17
> > - firefox
> > - gimp
> > - acrobat reader 7
> > - xmms, amsn (and maybe a few more small packages)
> >
> > What I've found until now:
> > - clear /usr/portage/distfiles and /var/tmp/portage after an
> > emerge, or
> > regularly (using tmpreaper)
> > - there are some users-made scripts (still buggy) that look for old
> > ebuilds
> > in portage tree and erases them (
> > http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-3011-highlight-
> > portage+space+usage.html)
> >
> > Any comments/ideas/scripts about this, or everyone has plenty space
> > to
> > spare...
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Fernando
> 
> As far as I know, that's pretty much what you can do (assuming that the 
> cleaning of /var/tmp/portage occurs when you have a failed emerge
> as well, since failed emerges leave the temporary work files there until 
> the emerge is either correctly completed, or you delete the files
> yourself).
> 
> The thing is, it now depends to some degree on just what you are emerging, 
> because as you fill your disk with emerged programs, and
> assuming that those programs don't reside on another disk (/usr, /var, 
> /tmp, or /opt on another disk or partition than / ), you will lose
> the ability to compile certain programs that naturally take up more space 
> than you have available during the emerge process.
> 
> I'm thinking specifically of OpenOffice.org, which takes about 3GB just to 
> emerge, but I suspect Mozilla and its ilk, and certain KDE
> programs may not be much better. Not to mention X.org <http://X.org> or 
> glibc. But from what you've said, even if /usr/portage/distfiles
> and /var/tmp/portage are empty, you wouldn't have enough space to emerge 
> OO.o at this time, and possibly other high-end programs as well.
> Of course, you could just use the openoffice-bin package for that case. 
> But not for every case that this might occur, and frankly, it's a
> losing proposition (either you have to be constantly on the ball as to how 
> much space every program you want needs to emerge, or you have
> to give up some stuff).
> 
> Less than 5GB is really not enough for a Gentoo install unless it's going 
> to be *very* minimal. If I was you, I'd look around for an old 5
> or 10 GB disk, slap it in the box and move /usr or /var (probably a better 
> choice) to that, and then mount it to the / partition.
> 
> Just my 0.02
> Holly
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