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You have probably filled up /var and /tmp, boot with a rescue disk and clear these folders out.
It is a good idea to have separate partitions for /tmp and /var then make root as small as possible.
hmm, what are you storing in the / folder. tells me you are most likely using the root account for things other than system maintence, which is not a good thing to be doing.
Originally posted by chbin hmm, what are you storing in the / folder. tells me you are most likely using the root account for things other than system maintence, which is not a good thing to be doing.
you are right, sth that I dont understand i though I was suppose to save all my files on my home directory and the icon which is placed on my desktop "Home" if i open it it will open the root directory...so basically I have saved all my files on the root dir...
so /root = "home"? in that case you're running X as root, which is really stupid idea. you should be runnign X as a normal user, then all your files would go to /home/username/
BUT again you seem a bit confused about the whole partition thing... what says what is actually full? please run "df -h" in a console and show us the EXACT output, so we can see for ourselves what the situation is.
Are you logging in as root rather than a normal user? That's the impression I get from what you say about clicking your home icon... if that's the case then DON'T! Create yourself a proper user (adduser <name>) will do it and don't sign in as root unless you really really need to do some sort of specific system task.
Oh, and fire up knoppix and use qtparted to resize your partitions a little.
and use it for day to day stuff. then it would be impossible for that user to create any files on the / directory as he doensn't have permission.
running around you machine as root is dangerous. far to much power to break things. Also, running things like firefox and downloading files as root is a security nightmare. In fact there is never any reason to log into X as root in the first place. root should only be used for system maintenence, upgrading packages, compiling and installing code, editing /etc files, etc.
after you created a new user. log in as root . going into the /root directory and mv anything you want to keep into /home/createduser dir. chmod createuser.users *.
then if you like. just to make things clean. go back into /root and do a rm -r * and rm -r .* to get rid of all the X,kde,gnome and whatever config files that shouldn't be there in the first place. I like the root directory being clean.
then just in case, go into /tmp as root and do an rm -r * and rm -r .*. reboot. you are now clean. log into created_user and then X and then firefox or whatever you like.
your /var directory shouldn't be a problem because crond uses logrotate to keep it stable, unless of course you are running a mail server or something, but for some reason I seriously doubt that
you could delete everything in /tmp. it only becomes a problem if you are on multi-user system with someone else logged on at the same time you are deleting everything in /tmp directory, because will you are deleting it they may be changing it. since you are only logged in as root and no one else is logged into your machine go ahead and do a
$ rm -r *
and
rm -r .*
then reboot. YES IT IS PERFECTLY SAFE. DON'T WORRY NOTHING WILL BREAK.
You have probably filled up /var and /tmp, boot with a rescue disk and clear these folders out.
It is a good idea to have separate partitions for /tmp and /var then make root as small as possible
deleting the /tmp directory in single user mode can be done with a rescue disk.
also deleting everything /var will break stuff unless you recreate the directory structure and touch certain files that need to be there. For instance, if you delete a file that is being used by syslog then even after reboot syslog wont recreate it, unless you do a touch file first.
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