Re: dpkg unable to write to /var/lib/dpkg/status, /var partition full
On 20/04/2008, Kyle Barbour <kylebarbour@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello there,
>
> I booted up my system this morning and tried to install something with
> aptitude, only to get the error message:
>
> W: Could not lock the cache file. Opening in read-only mode; any
> changes you make to the states of packages will NOT be preserved!
> E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a'
> to correct the problem.
>
> So, I tried running dpkg --configure -a, which gave me:
>
> dpkg: failed to write status record about `vlc-nox' to
> `/var/lib/dpkg/status': No space left on device
>
> I ran df, and I found that my /var partition is entirely full (1.9 GB
> of 1.9 GB). I don't know why - last night I ran 'aptitude
> safe-upgrade', maybe that has something to do with it? I'm not sure
> how to fix this problem - I'm assuming that I should pare down some
> files, but I'm not sure which ones or how to prevent this from
> happening again. Any thoughts?
>
> Thanks for the help,
> Kyle Barbour
I had this problem recently, if I remember right the file at
/var/log/user.log.0 had grown huge (6GB+) - I don't know if this was
the right thing to do but I just deleted it (it reappeared soon after
but has stayed a far more reasonable size - currently 18.kb).
Peter
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