strange report of 'df -h' "Size 7.7G Used 7.4G Avail 0 Use% 100", cannot start GNOME session

[peter kostov]

Hello,
I have a strange problem. The history is:
i have made a full installation of Fedora Core 3 (custom - everything),
so there were some packages that I would never use (language packs etc.)
and I had to remove them, but instead of that I decided to update and
enabled yum. That was stupid because there was about 200 MB free space
on the root partition... At the evening there was 0 bytes free space.
(My home directory is on another partition). I  don't know if yum has
updated anything but downloaded much. My first reaction was to delete
about 300 MB rpms from /var/spool/up2date. I have done that as root with
nautilus, but df still reported 0 bytes free space! When I turned the
computer on the next day it was impossible to log into GNOME. I tried to
start some graphical program (nautilus, evolution) from the failsafe
terminal but received the warning that it "could not create the
dir /tmp/orbit-peter - no space left on device" or "could not open
display 0:0, xlib - connection rejected form server" ?!! Login as root -
O.K., but again could not start any GNOME(?) program as normal user. I
succeeded to log into Xfce and KDE, but not into GNOME. Deleting some
files doesn't affect the output of df! Uninstalling some rpms resulted
in:

df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      7.7G  6.7G  621M  92% /

As you see 379 MB are missing?! That is what actually confuses me!
What is going on and how to fix it?

Please help!
Thank you in advance!!!
Peter
-- 
Peter Kostov, Photographer
Sofia, Bulgaria

Home site - www.light-bg.com