Bug#459889: Lack of space on HDD causes X to fail and it doesn't show any messages
reassign 459889 xserver-xorg-core
severity 459889 minor
thank you
Fernando Gomes wrote:
> 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.
Well, if you solved the problem with apt-get clean, then it means that
at least /var was full, so Xorg.0.log could not be written at all. It's
hard to write an error message there then :)
Brice
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