Shutdown my PC this morning and upon restart now have a non functional desktop.Everything looks normal but most apps won't open other than Firefox but that displays an error that my bookmarks and history are not functional and I can't access any sites other than my home site so I'm doing this from another PC.
I do have the ability to open the Log File Viewer and it displays this at the top:
**/var/log/Xorg.1.log**
Error when getting information for file "var/log/Xorg.1.log":No such file or directory
I can't find any errors in the logs other than the aformentioned one at the top of the window.
What I've tried is system restart and no love there,I also tried booting from the previous kernel but the issue persists.From what I've been able to find by doing some web searches is that my PC may be running as root but I can't find any real solutions.
user@um24:~$ ls -l $HOME
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Nov 9 05:23 Desktop
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 872 Oct 16 06:06 dns_verify
drwxr-xr-x 3 user user 4096 Nov 3 11:17 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Nov 12 18:20 Downloads
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Oct 29 12:01 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Oct 29 12:01 Public
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 0 Jan 17 07:35 scale
drwx------ 7 user user 4096 Jan 8 12:40 snap
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Oct 29 12:01 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Dec 8 08:11 Videos
user@um24:~$ ls -ld $HOME
drwxr-x--- 22 user user 4096 Jan 8 12:21 /home/user
user@um24:~$
The command that creates an endless loop in Linux and can fill up your disk is often referred to as a "fork bomb." It replicates itself indefinitely, consuming system resources and potentially crashing the system.
Do you hang onto *.deb files after install, or are those purged? If you don't purge, you probably should.
You can do that at any time by entering the command:
sudo apt-get clean
I do NOT recommend autoremove because that can be too "aggressive", and you might lose some useful packages that were "by-product" of installing others that have since been removed.
Also, make sure your /tmp directory has 777 privileges.
If you go thru your ${HOME} to preserve the >> selected << files that you have modified and cannot afford to lose (not whole directory), you can keep those "aside" safely, then perform a "reverse" rsync to restore your last backup, then overwrite any of those with those hand-preserved files.
You can try a command to get a feeling about what directories are taking up the most space.
The following command lists the 20 directories that take up the most space, up to a maximum depth of 6 and sorts the listing so that the directory that takes up the most space appears first . (The / directory will probably always appear first, since it logically contains all the other directories):
sudo du -h --max-depth=6 / 2>/dev/null | sort -hr | head -n 20
MATE Disk Usage Analyzer might be the most visual way to find out what's taking up space. It could be something unexpected like a crash dump (the contents of a program's memory when it crashed).
In this case, oopsie, I ran a fallocate command and filled up my /home - It is a bit limited in that it doesn't show files, only folders when you expand the tree.
If you can't open this tool via the menu, you can run it from the terminal:
mate-disk-usage-analyzer
I think it's installed as part of the MATE desktop, but if it's not installed... uh, maybe not.
My /tmp directory was loaded with over 200GB of files.I'd love to know how that happened but in the end opening Caja as root and deleting the contents of /temp and then running clean/autoclean/ as root did the trick.
I wish I could mark everyone's replies as the solution as they all pointed me in the right direction but running mate-disk-usage-analyzer as suggested by @lah7 showed me what I needed to see,it just took a REALLY LONG TIME to load!
Just curious Norm, did you try ‘safe mode’ and ‘clean' (attempt to free up space by removing unnecessary files) when you thought the disk was full? I have used that successfully myself.
Glad to hear! Ubuntu should empty /tmp on every boot. It's part of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. I'm not sure exactly 'what' piece triggers this and why it didn't run on your system.
On some distros, /tmp is mounted as a tmpfs (RAM disk) so never touches the disk. Even when I used Ubuntu, I add manually added it to /etc/fstab. Haven't had trouble with "running out of space" (default: half the RAM) but it depends how much you have to spare.
- It is a bit limited in that it doesn't show files, only folders when you expand the tree.