When the user fills up the hard drive

[Sean Hammond]

This problem is worse than I first thought. My user with the almost
full hard drive filled the whole thing *again* and had to get another
geek to come along and fix it for him again. This time it was not his
actions, but update manager that filled the hard drive when he agreed
to download some updates. The problem the had to be fixed by deleting
more files from his home directory.

To summarise:

There are several different bug reports. There seems to be general
feeling that this is a serious issue as non-technical users will be
unable to login or to free up space so that they can login. They won't
even know that the problem is lack of space. Also, this is a serious
fault with Ubuntu that competitors like Windows do not have. This
feeling is not always reflected in the priority settings of the bug
reports though.

I suggested putting / and /home on different partitions thinking it
would fix the problem, but this bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/62638 seems
to indicate it would not, and that GDM instead needs to be fixed. GDM
doesn't work if there is no free space on /home.

This bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/22842 says
that GDM doesn't work if there is no free space on /tmp.

This bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/35217
seems to be about GDM not logging in if /tmp is full also.

More bugs on launchpad about this issue:

https://launchpad.net/products/gdm/+bug/41170
https://bugs.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/47145

and some on Gnome's bugzilla too:

this one includes a list of what GDM uses /tmp for in a comment near the bottom
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=144473

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339229

Solutions that have been suggested are:

* GDM should create placeholder files in /tmp and /home  of the file
sizes that it needs when it starts up, and should provide some
information to the user if there is not enough space to create these
files. When the user logs in, GDM deletes the placeholder files
freeing up enough space to login.
* Mount a ramfs when GDM starts up and have GDM use that to create the
files it needs.
* Have GDM use the disk space that is reserved for the superuser.
* Fix GDM so that it does not write anything to disk to log you in
* GDM should allow the user to go to the failsafe XSession which
should let them login without needing any space

There are also at least two specs that have been written about this problem:

Add a tool to help the user avoid getting the disk full:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemCleanUpTool

Make applications in general react well to a full disk:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HandleNicelyLowDiskSpace

I was hoping there would be something I could do, without being able
to write a patch myself, to help this issue get fixed. But it seems
there are enough bug reports, suggested solutions, and specs about it.
Maybe something can be done with this summary to bring all of them
together as a spec for feisty+1 or something? Maybe, since the issue
is serious
and we seem to have enough info to work on a fix, the priorities of
the bug reports could be increased?