Table Of Contents
Recently I had a problem with portage and its tmp directory in /var/tmp/portage in Gentoo. I had no space left in the disk, the error message was:
There is NOT at least 10 GiB disk space at "/var/tmp/portage
So first I decided to change all the portage files to my secondary hard disk drive, here is how to change portage folders to a new location.
Changing /etc/portage/make.conf file
Suppose the new directory is /home/hkr/ssd2/portage.
The first thing to to is update the environment variables PORTDIR, DISTDIR and PKGDIR to point to the new location, so in the file make.conf we need to write:
PORTDIR="/home/hkr/ssd2/portage"
DISTDIR="${PORTDIR}/distfiles"
PKGDIR="${PORTDIR}/packages"
Syncing portage tree
Now that we had updated the variables, we need to sync portage:
emerge --sync
After that, portage now knows about the new location, but there is one more thing to do.
Symlinking make.profile to the new location
After syncing portage, one last thing to do is symlinking make.profile to the new location, previously it was a symlink to /usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop/, but we need to update it to the new location. Here is how:
ln -s /home/hkr/ssd2/portage/profiles/default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop /etc/portage/make.profile
Now everything is right and we have changed the portage location and get rid of the space problems.
Changing only the tmp directory (/var/tmp/portage)
After doing the previous steps, I realized that it would be a better option to only change the location of the tmp portage directory (by default /var/tmp/portage), that was the original problem, because I did not had enough space left there. So a better option would be leave make.conf as we had it previously, and only add a new variable:
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/home/hkr/ssd2/"
Hope it helps!.
References
Spot a typo?: Help me fix it by contacting me or commenting below!