dist-upgrade failure

[Steven Van Cleave <stvc@cox.net>]

On my Sarge (stable), 2.6.8-2-686, $ 'apt-get dist-upgrade' produces the
following error text:

>ldconfig:  Writing of cache data failed
>dpkg: error processing zlib1g (--configure):
>subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
>Errors were encountered while processing: zlib1g

I've done a fairly thorough search of solution sources without success.
 Running df yields:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             250M  250M     0 100% /
tmpfs                 253M     0  253M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda9              66G   15G   49G  23% /home
/dev/hda8             361M  8.1M  334M   3% /tmp
/dev/hda5             4.6G  4.1G  313M  93% /usr
/dev/hda6             2.8G  470M  2.2G  18% /var
tmpfs                  10M  772K  9.3M   8% /dev

This just started happening and I'm not sure why.  Any helpful
suggestions will be much appreciated.

Thanks!

Steve