Problem with display - HHD nearly full!
 

Hi!

I suspect that my Hard disk is getting full as I cannot access the graphical login page. i then logged in in text mode and try to delete as many files as I can in My home. When I type com df it says 91% full.

1) When I try to delete folders it says: rm: cannot remove 'Directory': Is a directory... What can I do to be able to delete folders?

2) When I reboot I got a flashing log in screen and the message:
"Failed to start the display server several times in a short time period, disabling display: 0 >>OK How can I enable the display again?

3) Is it safe to delete files in the /tmp directory? Where can I delete useless files like the Internet cache or temp files?

4) If I try redhat-config-xfree86 I have got an error message saying I have no font configured!!! What's this?

Thanks for your help.

Michel

Best-guess answers, in order:

1) You can type 'rm -rf directoryname' to delete the directories.

2) You might have deleted something that X needed to run.

3) Deleting /tmp files is pretty much pointless. /tmp files are temporary. They're deleted (generally) whenever you shut down.

4) Again, you might have removed something important.

In general, if you start removing things without having a pretty good idea what you're removing, you're asking for trouble. The best way to remove things is to uninstall them ('rpm -U programname', in this case).

Having a "full" hard drive isn't always a bad thing. In fact, it's a sign that you've estimated your needs properly, and are getting your money's worth. On the other hand, you might have installed things you'll never use, too. As for your graphical login problem, it's not that you have a lack of space, it's more likely to be that you didn't configure it correctly. Maybe it's as simple as you didn't tell X to start up in runlevel 5 on boot, or maybe you picked the wrong card/monitor combination, or perhaps you loaded the 3D drivers incorrectly (NVidea drivers sometimes do this.)

If you want more space, maybe you can allocate more from another partition. I hate to suggest this, but for a newbie, sometimes it's easier to go through the install again to fix problems than to try and fix them manually after the install. Once you have a few weeks experience with a working Linux install, you'll be able to correct these kinds of problems with ease, but it may be too frustrating to have to do it that way now, and it may give you the mistaken impression that Linux is "hard to use". (It's not, it's just different, and that difference takes time to adjust to.)

Concerning the problem of the graphical log in it is set properly at runlevel 5 but I get this message:

957X: client 4 rejected from local host
No fonts found; this probably means that the font config library is not correctly configured. You may need to edit the fonts.conf configuration file.

A web page is suggested but I see no clue there.
When I go to usr/X11R6/lib/X11 I see there are 4 files but I cannot get in the folder font. How can I fix that ? What can I do from the command line?

Thanks.

Michel

Become root
try a
locate fonts\.conf
Then, using less, determine
where the file points to, and if
the fonts still are there. If they
aren't you'll most likely have
deleted them, try to re-install
them from RPM.


Cheers,
Tink