Hey there! I'm pretty new to linux but was eager to learn and installed fedora 5 on my dell inspiron 1300 laptop dual booting linux and windows XP. All was great! Had to adjust the screen settings a bit but it all worked out of the box and I followed
stanton-finley's site

for installing and configuring all I needed. I recently updated everthing with yum and was happily using my new OS! I never had to mess around questioning and found all I wanted to know at LQ or fedora, just great!

But then suddenly the message appears at startup date the /tmp dir is full. I also had problems downloading small files, as Firefox displayed that there was not enough space in /tmp

Now I checked and deleted all files as a normal user. Got some messages that certain files couldnot be deleted, because of rights and usage. So they were not deleted. All files where in trashbin when I restarted. Bu upon reboot it wasn't possible to login to this account anymore; disk was too full. My guess is that the /tmp/.Trash file fills up the partition too much now and X can't really start up. As a root I could login and I deleted all files in this users .Trash and I think the root's trash as well, but can't really remember.

Now things got worse: Can't login in graphic mode anymore as root or just to a desktop without taskbar and all.
The system can't find files like these anymore...
.ICE-unix/*
.X0-lock
.X11-unix
orbit-*
gconfd-*

Now I've been searching the forums everywhere and see how stupid I've been, deleting all /tmp files in graphic mode. I understand that now. But what to do now? I could never find any post about restoring these files.
SO HERE ARE THE QUESTIONS:

-How can I restore the old files and make a good login possible again?
-My /tmp folder is actually a /tmp partition, which was recommended somewhere.... I'm not sure if I'm still happy with it; it's just 100MB and I want it bigger. And I'll add a script for deleting old files regularly
-Is it a solution to install fedora 5 again then... it would not be a big problem and I like this idea as well, to have everything clean again, although it cost some time... But then... how about grub... will windows still automatically start when I delete all Linux partition with Knoppix; I think not!


Really apreciate your help! JUst a link to a good post somewhere would be great as well! THNX

/tmp is tmp. I dont think deleting any files there could have caused a problem. What you could check is if you have not accidentaly deleted /tmp folder itself.

100MB is too small, maybe thats causing the problem.

just reboot with the FC5 cd and install again, no need for knoppix or anything. use the custom layout this time. Its good for beginners.

if found this somewhere too.

Hey w3bd3vil!!! Thanks a lot. I'll reinstall FC 5 some day soon. But then one more stupid question; what do you think about the option to use the /tmp folder as if it was a RAM module, thus having it cleared on every shutdown? I read this a few times everywhere but can't find any disadvantages! Thanks again. Ciao

i don't think you really need to reinstall... you could boot a linux cd and then from there mount your root partition and then comment-out or delete the line for /tmp in /etc/fstab... this would then automatically make /tmp reside on the / partition and hence it will enjoy all the free space on it... and if /tmp was deleted just mkdir it...

as for having /tmp in RAM (tmpfs), that's cool sometimes... it will use RAM by expanding and contracting as necessary (unlike a ramdisk) and will also spill-out into swap if needed... personally, i don't like the stuff i do in /tmp to eat my RAM...