If you do a:
du -hs /usr/portage/distfiles
and a
du -hs /usr/portage
You will see that the majority of the space is taken up by the
distfiles. This is where emerge stores all the packages that it
downloads when installing them on your system. To decrease the size of
the directory you can go through it and delete older versions of
packages such as:
I have:
zlib-1.2.1.tar.bz2
zlib-1.2.3.tar.bz2
So you could delete zlib-1.2.1.tar.bz2 since there is a new version. I
think there are some scripts out there that do such things but I havent
bothered to find them. I wouldnt suggest deleting all the files since
if you want to reinstall or add new packages they may require files
that have been already downloaded ie: save you the time and bandwidth
of redownloading them.
Cheers
Rav
--
"When
you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at
you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, for free". -
Linus Torvalds, 1995