When the user fills up the hard drive

[Sean Hammond]

I'm told that if a user fills up the entire hard drive on Windows XP
and then restarts the machine Windows will more or less keep running,
because a certain amount of space is always reserved for the page
file. So the user will still be allowed to login, although the system
will probably complain lots and go very slow. But they'll get warnings
about the disc being full and have a chance to take action.

I recently got a panicked phone call from an Ubuntu user who had
filled the disk (disc?) up. It's partly his fault -- he ignored
Ubuntu's warnings that he was running out of space and kept
downloading, then restarted the computer. When you do this on Ubuntu,
you find that you can't login to GNOME. It doesn't give you any reason
either, just drops you back at GDM. So the user suspected that the
problem was due to lack of disc space, but at this point could do
nothing to free up space, and couldn't even get to the Internet to
search for help. All he could do was phone me up and say 'Help! My
essay is due today and I can't login!'. Ubuntu, like other linux
distros, goes down pretty hard when you fill up the disk. I've also
noticed that when the disk is full, but not so full that you can't
login, random things will happen, such as the network card
disappearing from the system, until you free up space and restart.

Maybe this is worth a bug report?

When I install Ubuntu for myself, I create seperate partitions for /
and /home. I don't do this when I install it for others, cause I don't
want to give them a non-default setup. By doing this I can reinstall
Ubuntu or install another Linux without having to backup and restore
/home. I think it might also prevent GNOME from failing to login, as
even if I fill up /home, / will still have some space. Am I right?
Does this mean that Ubuntu should use this partitioning scheme by
default?

Either way, something needs to be done to prevent the system from
going down so hard if the disk gets filled. In the case of the user
who phoned me, I had to switch to a virtual terminal, login, explore
his home directory and find some suitably large yet unimportant files
to remove, mount his external hard drive manually, then move the files
onto it, unmount the drive safely, logout and switch back to GDM. I
showed him what I was doing, but it's a pretty involved process that
requires having a lot of Linux commands committed to memory. There's
no way he remembered enough to do it himself in the future.