I have received "Disk space exhausted" messages during software installation and during the initial installation of openSUSE 10.2, but successfully continued installation.

Looking for the cause, I noticed that the yast "software management" module inappropriately reports disk space usage on my rather small root partition.  It apparently thinks the root partition is where all files of a package, as well as all temporary files, will be installed.

Here's a partial df of my system.  Note that root is rather small and other partitions such as /usr are rather larger.

/dev/hdc1               497829    133704    338423  29% /
/dev/hdc2              6198436   2993836   2889728  51% /usr
/dev/hdc3              2071416    943568   1022624  48% /opt
/dev/hdc8              2071384     78352   1887808   4% /tmp
/dev/md0               3612272    410420   3018316  12% /var
/dev/md1               5368208    181316   4914196   4% /home
/dev/hdc9             17599604   6988364   9717228  42% /srv

Root is 29% full after installation of (to pick a large package example) the kernel sources.  Before installation, it was something like 28%.  Yet when the package was selected for installation, yast reported that root would be something like 90% full.  As installation proceeded, df showed a gradual increase in /usr and /tmp, and much less in root.  Yast, however came to the point where it thought disk space was exhausted, and gave me an option to continue, which I did, and the package was successfully installed.