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/).
Comment from Hans on September 29, 2007 at 10:55 AM
And any case it's good that you've finally figured out the way out!