Linux - I'm such a n00b

Do you have any idea how long it takes to build the Ximianized version of OpenOffice.org on a P!!!-733? I don't either (because I can't be bothered to check the logs), but it's a long time. So how did I feel when I found out after a whole night of crunching, an error message saying emerge failed because of an IO error on a copy operation? Confused. Dismayed. Angry. And finally, curios. df -h showed I had 1MB left free on the root partition. du -hx --max-depth=1 on / and then on /root showed I've been neglecting some housekeeping business since the last time I logged in as root to recover from my tinkering. A few judicious rm -r's later, I had enough room to try again. I really have to repartition...