Ubuntu
xorg package

Xorg won't start if no space left in /

Asked by Dmitry Diskin

I do not have clear description of the problem.. Friend called and asked for help, X did not start and prompted for 'one time low resolution session', but it also failed, and looped. It turned out that there was a single partition, and it become 100% full. The question is: should Ubuntu be "smarter" in that case? When booting from Live CD, it is able to work without any disk device at all. Should it detect the inability to write some files, and show warning, instead of crashing? Maybe there is a bug already for this, or it is even fixed in some later versions (it happened in Lucid)?

Thanks in advance.
Dmitry.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

The liveCD runs in RAM so your partition's state is of no interest to the CD.

It is a bit annoying, most people find if you remove the old unused kernels you get a tonne of space back. You can boot to root recovery console for that. Should boot ok

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Dmitry Diskin (diskin) said : 		#2

Yes, I understand that liveCD does not write to my partitions. But should the whole system be more friendly? I know that Gnome shows some warning when partitions are getting full, but a child was watching movies, and another movie was downloading, so the warning was ignored. And as a result - unusable system! Thoughts?

Also, how to boot in recovery console, if grub menu is not shown (Ubuntu is the only system)?

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

The warning was there, what more can be done? If you hold shift you will see the grub menu. Select recovery mode then select root and you can use apt-get to remove stuff to make space to get a GUI. You could remove the office suite as this is quite big. I also recommend you run:

sudo apt-get clean

As this will clean the old debs out from past updates.

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Dmitry Diskin (diskin) said : 		#4

Thanks actionparsnip!

Any other opinions? I mean, does it worth to implement a "smart" check while loading X, and load it and show a disk space warning/error, instead of saying false message about failed video driver? I guess for a non-techie, it is almost impossible to diagnose the problem, if they missed the free space alert, and then rebooted.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#5

In an attempt to create a cross link from this question to question #162658 someone erroneously created a link to bug #162658, a bug that is completely unrelated to this question. Currently there is no function in launchpad to mark a question related to or a duplicate of another question, so I remove the bug link and add the reference here:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+question/162658

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Dmitry Diskin (diskin) said : 		#6

Manfred Hampl, thanks!

So, I was not alone with this problem. What is the right way to proceed? I'm not a member of any development group, maybe someone can start a proper discussion which can result in an enhancement bug?

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#7

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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Dmitry Diskin (diskin) said : 		#8

Crated bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/815722