I accidentally filled up my root partition and now Xorg won't start. I've cleaned out about 350 megs but still nothing. For some reason it won't let me view man pages either.

First I should explain I have a 60 gig hard drive divided into three partitions:
5 GB: windows (fat)
5 GB: linux (ext3)
1 GB: swap
45 GB: personal files (ext3)

My linux partition is the one that filled up. Now, when I reboot, I get to the KDM, but it won't let me actually log in. I can log on using the console, but when I startx it goes back to the command line. Other than missing some fonts, I can't tell what's wrong.

Now I'm going to miss class because I need to fix this. Sorry to sound like such a newb. Can anyone help me please?

So what gives
df -h

and
ls -lad /tmp

(just a guess..)

tail /var/log/Xorg.0.log would help also
tail ~/.xsession-errors

By the way, in kdm, to switch to the console type ctrl alt f1

Ha ha, fixed it!

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-u.../msg70667.html

Solution: sudo chmod 777 /tmp

When I was trying to clean out room on my hard drive, one of the things I did was delete the /tmp directory. Looks like Linux recreated it, but with the wrong permissions. Giving 777 permission allows Xorg to boot!

Sorry for the false alarm!

Edit: Thanks to nx5000 for the super-fast response!

You're welcome!

I'm glad you've got your system working again. Just a small point though, /tmp normally has permissions 1777, not 0777. This lets users create and delete their own files, but not the files belonging to other users.

Hey, any tips on how to reduce the size of the installation? One nice thing on windows is it tells you how large your installed programs are. A linux install shouldn't need to fill up 5 gigs; how do I bring it back down again?

Thanks!

That depends on what you're using it for...

You can use the Kubuntu package manager to see what is installed and then remove packages where you know what they do and also know you don't need them. For example if you have 2 web browsers, you can remove the one you don't use.

You can also use du to see where large disk usage occurs:
If, for example, that tells you that there is a lot of space under /var being used:
And so on until you see what is using up the space. If you know you don't need it, remove it (but don't guess).

Tools like logrotate can help manage disk usage by archiving and overwriting old copies of logs instead of just getting larger and larger.

Hope that helps...