Disk Thrashing

[lameth]

When I was using rpmdrake to see if Sun's Forte' was installed my hard drive started thrashing. The system completely locked up, mouse response was delayed by about three minutes and then moved very slowly.I could do absolutely nothing.
Also the installation of the jdk failed it gave no other error message other than installation failed.
Is there anyway to exit Linux gracefully when the disk thrashes like that?
Space in / on hda2 is getting cramped so that might be why the installation didn't take, although there is still 71 mb free, not much I know. However,/home on hda4 has a good deal of free space, I know it's bad linux ettiquete but is alright to install the jdk and forte in /home?

[pbharris]

i have installed programs in /home/ and created links in /usr/bin , worked okay!

[Strike]

pbharris is right, that's what symlinks are for. They are kind of a kluge, but they solve the problem. This is why I always give /usr at least half of the space that I'm giving to Linux.