Bug#459889: Lack of space on HDD causes X to fail and it doesn't show any messages

[Brice Goglin <Brice.Goglin@ens-lyon.org>]

Fernando Gomes wrote:
> Package: Xorg or maybe KDM or GDM
> Version: Debian Etch
>
> I've made an upgrade yesterday on a laptop to the latest Etch release,
> and suddenly the graphical environment stop working due to lack of
> space left on the hard disk. It took me some time to figure out what
> happened because no messages were shown on /var/log/Xorg.0.log, and
> KDM didn't report anything too. I had to manually start X, and quickly
> type CTRL-C to see the error message. After run a 'apt-get clean' the
> system worked again.
>

Well, if you managed to start X manually, then the bug is not in X :)
If you want to try again, just do
    startx /usr/bin/xterm
so that nothing but X and xterm is launched.

Brice