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I have downloaded the newest most stable Linux kernel, 2.6.33.2.

I thought I would test this using VirtualBox. So I create a dynamically sized harddisk of 4 GB. And installed CentOS 5.3 with just the minimum packages.

I setup the make menuconfig with just the default settings.

After that I ran make and got the following error: 

net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o: final close failed: No space left on device
make[2]: *** [net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [net/bluetooth] Error 2
make: *** [net] Error 2

The amount of space I have left is:

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      3.3G  3.3G     0 100% /
/dev/hda1              99M   12M   82M  13% /boot
tmpfs                 125M     0  125M   0% /dev/shm

My virtual size is 4 GB, but the actual size is 3.5 GB.

$ ls -hl
total 7.5G
-rw-------. 1 root root 3.5G 2010-04-13 14:08 LFS.vdi

How much size should I give when compiling and installing a Linux kernel? Are there any guidelines to follow when doing this? This is my first time, so just experimenting with this.

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Recent linux kernel is about 60MB bzip2 archive, which after unpacking and compiling takes about 400-500MB.

You can check your directory size with du -hs like:

/mnt/storage/linux-2.6.33$ du -hs                               
437M    .
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Hello, if that is the case then why is all my disk space being used up. I have allocated a 4gb harddisk and only installed CentOS with only the development tools and libraries. Shouldn't take up that much disk space. When I installed CentSO I just setup 1 partition for root and nothing else. Any problem with that? – ant2009 Apr 13 '10 at 10:40
You can investigate what is eating your space with du -h --max-depth=1 run in your root directory (/). Take the biggest directory, go into it, repeat. Do this untill you find your disk hogs. – Ivan Petrushev Apr 15 '10 at 5:40
To list files in current dir sorted by size use ls -lhS, and to see top 10 biggest file in the current dir use ls -lhS|head -10. – Ivan Petrushev Apr 15 '10 at 5:41
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From Guide,

NOTE: If you do not have lot of disk space in /usr/src then you can unpack the kernel source package on any partition where you have free disk space (like /home). Because kernel compile needs lot of disk space for object files like *.o. For this reason the /usr/src/linux MUST be a soft link pointing to your source directory.

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