Cannot log in to KDE [Out of disk space?]

[CyberDork34]

About a month after installing Kubuntu, I started getting messages that I was out of disk space. This was strange because I had plenty of space and inodes to spare, plus the errors would go away and programs would work normally after a restart. So I thought this was just one of the abundant amount of bugs that happily crawled into my Kubuntu system. Everytime (rarely) I would get the messages I would just reboot and everything would be nice and dandy...until today, when I tried to install Rosebush. It had an error installing so I cancelled and restarted the install, only to get a message that the tmp was out of disk space and KDE could not run. I can no longer log in, as it just flashes and gets me back to the log in screen, so I cannot retrieve any of my lost data. I am going to re-install Kubuntu 13.10, but can anyone tell me what was going on, and how to prevent this from happening in the future?

I dual boot Windows 8.1 and Kubuntu

[Snowhog]

Boot into recovery (single user) mode from the Grub menu. After logged in type:

df -hT --exclude-type=tmpfs --exclude-type=devtmpfs

Also:

sudo fdisk -l

Need to see the results of both.

[CyberDork34]

oh. I already went ahead and did a reinstall, with more space for the root partition, sorry. Any advice to prevent the problem

[Snowhog]

Do regular cleanups. Deleting downloaded .deb packages (after installing/dist-upgrading) and removing older, unneeded kernels and their associated baggage.

How do you have your HDD partitioned? Are you using separate root and home partitions? If you'll show us your partitioning, we can better advise.

[CyberDork34]

http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2hf06zk&s=5

The above is a link to a pic of my partitions, the first is SWAP, followed by root, then home

[Snowhog]

Okay, separate root and home partitions. That's good.

When you download/install applications, the .deb files are kept in /var/cache/apt/archives and /var/cache/apt/archives/partial. Deleting these packages returns disk space in the root partition. The other thing that consumes disk space in the root partition are new kernels. As a general rule, you really only need the current (primary) working kernel -- the one you boot into -- and the previous one (in case something goes awry with your primary boot kernel). Deleting older kernels recovers consumed disk space in the root partition.

Cleaning up downloaded .deb files is easy. Open a konsole and type:

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove && sudo apt-get clean && sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/lock

Deleting older kernels is also simple enough from the konsole. Type:

dpkg --list | awk '/linux-image/ {print $2}'

This shows you the kernels you have installed. The output looks like this (from my PC):

linux-image-3.11.0-14-generic
linux-image-3.11.0-15-generic
linux-image-extra-3.11.0-14-generic
linux-image-extra-3.11.0-15-generic
linux-image-generic

I have just two kernels installed. 3.11.0-14 and 3.11.0-15, with 3.11.0-15 being my primary boot kernel.

To delete an older kernel you would type:

sudo apt-get purge linux-image-x.x.x-xx-generic

Replace the x.x.x-xx with the numbers of the kernel you desire to delete as shown by the first command.

[CyberDork34]

Thank you so much for your help

[Snowhog]

You're welcome. Merry Christmas, and welcome to Kubuntu Forums . Net.