out of disk space
 

Hi
I am having dual boot system Opensuse 11.1 and Windows vista. I have allotted about 5 GB space to home partition. Now sometimes I copy/move files from Windows partitions to /home, this is easily done. But when I restart the computer, It hangs and KDE is not loaded giving reason that disk is out of space. I have to work on commandline and delete some files from /home to free some space,only then I can restart the computer normally. This is very annoying.When I copy/move files then Opensuse should immediately give me a warning.It seems nonsense to not start kde. Please give me advise.

desktop? laptop? server?
if you can add a new disk
format it
copy your stuff to it
then edit /etc/fstab to mount the disk as /home

It is a Desktop computer. Question is not adding another disk but about behaviour of Opensuse which gives no warning in advance.

Computers in general should not attempt to save the user from every possible circumstance---Windows tries to do this sometimes and often creates a mess in the process.

It is not obvious to me how filling up the /home directory will affect the behaviour of the Operating System**. Please give us the complete picture of how this machine is set up---eg:

size of hard disk
number and type of partitions
RAM

The best long-term solution is to use drives and partitions that are MUCH bigger than what you think you need. e.g.: The cost difference between 80 GB and 250 GB is pretty small.

**I guess that maybe when the directory is full, it can't write config files?

Configuration of my computer is 1 GB RAM 111 GB SATA Hard Disk 5 GB to / 5.5 GB to /home ext3 and 900 MB to swap. Windows partitions are C: D: E: F: all NTFS and G: Fat32 all almost equal size of 20 GB.
Please suggest how much space should always be left in /home to boot the system smoothly.

I believe that you are running out of disk space because of the growing logs and actually during a file copy / move operation. You might want to either grow the size of your partitions, or add a disk. It is recommended to reserve at least 20 GB for linux if you intend to use Gnome or KDE.

If your disk gets full (100% used) KDE and some other applications / daemons (services) may not be able to start simply because they do not have any space to write to disk.

KDE usually requires to be able to write to either /home/your_username/ (or /root if you are logged in as root) & /tmp

The reason you do not get warnings is the way Linux handles file copy / write operations.
Windows would:
1. First spend time checking the properties of the source files (number of files, size, permissions etc.).
2. Next it would reserve the needed space at the destination.
3. Even if it was not able to successfully reserve the needed space in the step above, it would try to now copy the files, preserving all the permissions of the source on the destination.
4. If a file is not copied successfully, it gives an error and attempts to undo the last copy action.

As a result, you risk ending up in an inconsistent state depending on what was successfully copied and what wasn't.

Linux on the other hand simply starts copying block by block. It will ignore the permissions unless you explicitly ask it to with parameters (eg: cp -p). By default, it will write the destination as the user that is performing the copy operation. If the file cannot be successfully written due to size, it will throw an error.

The only way to answer that is to look at the files. You could, for example, remove all the data and then use "du" and "df" to see what's left.

The absolute easiest thing to do is simply install another drive and mount it to the existing system at /home. In 30 minutes or less, you can have 20X-200X the current space.

Next best: Re-size existing partitions roughly as follows:

15GB Windows
15GB Linux (no separate /home)
~80GB shared data

Whatever you do, be sure all your data is backed up first.