/tmp full

[Mark Greenwood]

On Saturday 10 Jul 2010 11:03:59 Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> On Saturday 10 July 2010, Nigel Ridley wrote:
> > On 07/10/2010 12:29 PM, Nigel Ridley wrote:
> > > Running Karmic.
> > > 
> > > My wife and our 3 girls share a laptop. They treat it like their
> > > cupboards and just keep stuffing more and more files in it. So
> > > now nobody can log in as, after entering username/password
> > > there is just a thin little window error message:
> > > 
> > > Xsession: warning: unable to write to /tmp; X session may exist
> > > with an error okay
> > > 
> > > Clicking on 'okay' takes me back to the KDE login screen.
> > > 
> > > I can use Alt Ctrl F1 and am comfortable using the cmd line but
> > > the girls have a [bad] habit of using spaces and illegal
> > > characters in their file and folder names. Also they have named
> > > a lot of them in Hebrew which just shows up as small diamonds
> > > instead of normal [Hebrew] characters.
> > > 
> > > How can I free up enough space so that we can get back into the
> > > GUI and start deleting these illegally named files and folders?
> > > 
> > > Nigel
> > 
> > OK! I managed it from the cmd line:
> > 
> > sudo rm -r /home/username/.thumbnails
> > 
> > I did it for all the users on the laptop and now we can log in :-)
> > Then I told them to get some 'housekeeping' done!!
> 
> You may also want to consider installing mc, that way you can just 
> simply select those files instead of having to enter their names...
> 
>   --Reinhold
> 
> 
There's also a grub option (I think) which will automatically empty /tmp at boot - although it seems that it wasn't in fact /tmp in your case... :-)

Mark