Re: incomplete update(?) trashed my system
Quoting Charles Blair (c-blair@illinois.edu):
> Thanks for all previous suggestions.
>
> An "updates available" message resulted in an update that
> stopped in the middle because of insufficient space. This has
> left me with a system in which character-based programs are working,
> but any attempt to use a program that tries to open an X-window
> leads to a screen with a cartoon of a frowning monitor and a
> message that my system has had to be stopped for its own good.
>
> I ran apt-get clean, which seems to have reduced the space
> used by /var (see output below). However, what can I do about
> /root ? Attempts to run claws-mail and mozilla/iceweasel
> produce the frowning-monitor message.
My own approach would be to adduser a username for all the
non-recommended (ie non-administrative)tasks you've been using root
for. Move the files out of /root but leaving behind things like
.aptitude/ .bash_history .ssh/
You may need to extract modifications to .profile and .bashrc if
you've added things. Some dotfiles like .pulse can be deleted as they
seem to get recreated (in a cleaner state).
That will shift loads of stuff like .cache/ .mozilla/ and .claws-mail/
from / to /home/<username> (which is, hardly surprisingly, almost
empty).
The only non-empty directories in hy wheezy /root are .aptitude/ and
.ssh/ (as .gconf/ is empty).
Check you haven't put any security-related stuff in dotfiles like
.xsession which you will be moving out of root.
> After I get sufficient disk space, is there something simple
> I can do to resume the updating operation that started the problem?
I would then apt-get update and upgrade as usual and see if the checks
built into that will cope. The downloads should still be in /var/cache
waiting to go. If there are problems, repost the results.
Cheers,
David.
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