Bug#459889: Lack of space on HDD causes X to fail and it doesn't show any messages
Thanks for your response Brice,
But actually I couldn't start X manually. It seems like X doesn't work if there's no space left on the hard disk. I don't know if this could be called a 'bug' or if it's the normal behaviour for a graphical environment. But it's clearly a problem because the error message cannot be found anywhere, becoming difficult to find what's going on and free up some space. I just discovered the problem when I typed 'startx' then quickly typed 'CTRL-C' to break the process, so I could see the error message on my console.
I'm not an english speaker so possibly my explanation is kinda confusing.
What we could call the 'bug' here is that X doesn't start when there's no space left on the hard disk, and the only message warning that the HDD is full is shown too quick, almost impossible to see it and discover the problem. The situation is not common, but can happen, so it could be a good idea to find a way to log this kind of error on /var/log/Xorg.0.log or display a pop-up warning that X cannot start due to lack of space on the hard disk.
Fernando.
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2008/1/9, 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
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