Fun with a Full Disk

If you happen to leave live TV playing all day, which fills up the disk and causes nothing to work--I feel your pain. Our KnoppMyth system was in an endless loop of telling us "xsession: warning: unable to write to /tmp; X session may exit with an error." Restarting X would bring up the exact same message over and over. What fun. At this point you'll figure out that you need to get to single-user mode to be able to do anything.

But how do you do that? It took me about a half-hour to figure out, but hit capslock to bring up LILO. At the boot prompt you can enter "Linux single" to get started in single-user mode, where you can go through and delete the giant files. Interestingly, there were no giant cache files on our system, it was a 3+ GB mythfrontend.log file causing the trouble (in /var/log/mythtv/).