raman narasimhan wrote:
i was installing new packages into my lenny system via synaptic.. when it was applying the changes, i got the following error message:*E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.E: _cache->open() failed, please report. * so i tried dpkg --configure -a i got this message *dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:failed to write status record about `libmng-dev' to `/var/lib/dpkg/status': No space left on device* what should i do??
This means that the partition on which your /var/cache/apt/archives directory sits is full.
If this is on the same partition as your /home directory, you might can delete/move some movies or other large files to an external disk, etc, to free up some space.
At any rate, you'll have to do something to free up space in this directory (and this may or may not affect other parts of your system, depending on if this (or more of the /var directory) is on a separate partition or not).
If you have a lot of older .debs in that directory that you no longer need, you can run "aptitude autoclean" to clear out the ones that are no longer (by default) installable. Or you can clean out all the .debs with "aptitude clean". Or you can manually delete a few .debs to make enough room to install a few smaller packages, then install those few smaller packages and then delete their .debs, and continue on in this fashion. But if you're running low on space in your /var/apt/cache/archives directory, you're probably running low elsewhere, and this method probably won't help much.
If /lib/modules is on the same partition, you might have three of seven older kernel directories there, which you can remove to free up space.
You can always uninstall stuff to perhaps help, or move/recreate partitions to resize them as needed.
"df -h" and such (like "df -h /var/cache/apt/archives") will give you a good feel for how much space is free where.
-- Kent