maniacmartin

Quite a few times recently, Donov has managed to render thinky, an old IBM thinkpad, unable to login. At the KDM login screen, you type a username and password, and you get back to the login screen.

Investigations reveal that the cause of this is that running apt-get downloads .debs and leaves them in /var/cache/apt/archives . Thinky only has a 2GB hard drive, so it literally filled the whole partition before it errored out (not enough disk space). Thus, when anyone wants to log into KDE, there is no disk space to make any temporary files, so the login fails.

A quick fix is to add the following lines to /etc/rc.local, to clear apt’s cache on boot-up
rm -rf /var/cache/apt/*
mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives
mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

Edward Lyon of SCS Technology Solutions has kindly offered to donate a bigger hard drive to thinky to prevent this problem happenning in the future.