suddenly filling of hd and no access to x

[Derek Broughton]

Accessys at smart.net wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, Derek Broughton wrote:
> 
>> NoOp wrote:
>> >>
>> >> oh yes can boot up from live CD into xwindow but don't have
>> >> permissions to delete any files or empty trash.  can't get to root
>> >> either.
> 
> can get to the files from the live CD but won't let me delete them and
> can't find the trash can to try and empty it, in the old kde it
> refused to let me empty it so that would have made a few gb of space
> to work with at least.
> 
>> > Knoppix
>>
>> If he's got an Ubuntu live CD, of course he can get to root.  Just open a
>> terminal window, or ctrl-alt-f1.
> 
> I can get to root, but even in root it won't let me do anything to the
> hard drive files saying I don't have permissions (guess that is to
> protect things while using a live CD but stops me from making critical
> repairs)

No, if the drive is mounted, and you are root, then you can delete from it.  
The Live CD is _intended_ (amongst other things) to make it easy to make 
repairs.

>> My vote is for strigi or whatever gnome uses instead.  strigi used to
>> fill
>> up my wife's drive even though it was supposedly turned off.  So I
>> terminated it with extreme prejudice, and no more space problems...
> 
> what is strigi????  never loaded it to my knowledge (I use KDE)

Then you have strigi.  It's installed by default, and it eats disks for 
breakfast.  Look for a folder in your home directory named, iirc, .strigi.  
In there, should be a folder named "lucene" (or similar), and I'd bet it 
will be the only thing that needs deleting.  If that's the case, then run:

# sudo aptitude purge ~istrigi

It's a horrible useless POS.
-- 
derek