Unable to login

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi all,
This one is weird. And a bit long-winded. Sorry.

I’m using 11.2 64bit with KDE.

The only things that happened today were that i accepted an update through the updater applet. I can’t remember exactly what it was - kprtx? or something?

After that i tried to copy a largish file across from a folder shared on my Ubuntu box. It was about 600Mb but when i navigated to the samba share through Opensuse and copied the file from the Ubuntu box to a local folder, it was only transferring around 100Kb/s. Not really cool for a 100Mb connection. So i cancelled that.

Not long after that, things went weird. The hard drive went into overdrive and then the desktop dropped to a blank screen - the window manager KDE crashed? Something was still functioning because i ctl-alt-deleted up the shutdown applet and rebooted.

After the reboot, i logged in again and things were ok for a minute. I brought up konsole and 'zypper up’ed for a few packages through the Packman and Google repository but as it upgraded Chrome, the window manager crashed again and everything went black.

I had YaST open, though, and its window remained open even after the desktop dropped to black. So i opened the software manager expecting an error because the terminal was still running the updates in the background but there was none so i suspect konsole was closed along with the window manager when it crashed. So i went to view the repositories through the software manager module in YaST and all were missing.

I rebooted again and it all booted ok as far as the login screen. When i entered my password, etc the screen momentarily went blank and then dropped back to the login prompt again. It happened over and over.

So i rebooted again, this time attempting to log into the failsafe desktop. It failed. It wouldn’t go past the login prompt again - just constantly kept bringing up the login screen after i’d enter my password.

So i’m at a loss now. It seems there’s been some sort of data corruption or something? But the only thing that immediately preceded the problem was copying a file over the network and browsing the net. I’m currently running a check on my hard drive to see if there are any problems there.

I can get to a terminal prompt but that’s about it. Any suggestions on the way forward from there?

Thanks.

2

Boot to yast in level 3
Check your repos.
Boot to Level 3, then Yast and More… - openSUSE Forums

Whilst there, in yast, create a new user, and then reboot and try the new user.
If you can login with that, let me know.

3

Hi caf,
Thanks for taking the time to help.

Ok, i think i know what the problem is. From the terminal prompt, a df -h revealed that my root partition is completely full. 100%. I also noticed in the logs that there was a message about PID can’t be created because device is full.

I took your advice and ran yast from the terminal prompt and all the repositories were still there. I also created a new user but didn’t try to log in because i think the problem is with the root partition being completely used up.

I don’t know what happened. It’s a 40Gig partition so it shouldn’t be full. It was just over 1/2 full yesterday. I think it ties in with the weirdness from the network. I noticed it trying to cache the file i was copying over.

I’m not sure the desktop will magically reappear if i do make space on the root partition, but i know there’s definitely a problem there that’s somehow linked.

Any suggestions on cleaning up the partition without deleting anything vital?

4

Clean out /tmp

5

In yast level 3
find the equivalent of this
Clear Temp Files at Boot - openSUSE Forums

reboot
and you should be good

6

Thanks caf!

I’m posting from my resurrected desktop.

My tmp folder was 34G for some reason. And i guess when it hit the limit before, it corrupted my user profile? Because even after clearing some space by deleting objects in the tmp folder, it still wouldn’t login. So i deleted the kde-username folder in there, et al and then it was all good on a reboot!

I hope i haven’t screwed anything up. I figured that anything in the /tmp folder is fairly expendable anyway.

I also set the max_days_for_tmp_files thing in the /etc/sysconfig editor as you suggested, so hopefully i won’t encounter this again.

And here i was thinking i’d need to reinstall! Thanks again.

7

Joe,

If you have followed the guide to clear /tmp files at boot you should be good now.
Well done sorting that out!:wink:

8

Joe Punchcard wrote:
> Any suggestions on cleaning up the partition without deleting anything
> vital?

use the forums advanced search function to learn how to safely delete
items inside your /tmp (easiest way is boot from the install CD/DVD,
and just delete everything inside /tmp…but do NOT do that if booted
to the hard drive)

and, go into /var/log and look for HUGE log files…i can’t tell you
now which you need to keep…but, any that are really big should at
least be compacted with some sort of archiver (tar, bz, zip, etc)
[again, this is an item covered many times here: search for full hard
drive and you will find where to look and the tools to use to discover
where the huge files are…]

and, you might look where you put that 600 mb file…did you
accidentally also try to transfer 60 GB, and it did until if filled up?

don’t be trying to update with YaST/Zypper until you have sorted the
full drive problem…not just make spare room, but determine WHY it
filled up, and fix that problem (which caused the symptom of being full)

–
palladium

9

> I hope i haven’t screwed anything up. I figured that anything in the
> /tmp folder is fairly expendable anyway.

but only expendable when the system is NOT running…that is, while
running there will be files active in the /tmp directory, which if
you delete them will cause you untold pain…

–
palladium

10

Hi, I’ve recently had the same problem.

It occurred during the recent Tex-Live updates which came through at the same time as the last ‘kpartx’ on my system.

Kpartx installed, Tex-live docs installed, but during the Tex-live update the X11 system crashed. I’d noted the tex-live docs and distro were listed at about 1.0 GB in total, after several failed update attempts I also ran out of space, the last message I got from Yast2 in KDE was something like 'Partition / needs 4kb… ’

I could still login to runlevel 5 but only as Root, my usual profile was damaged.

I’ll try out the solutions listed above, hopefully they will cure my problems. Thanks for you posting the subject it should help me quite a lot.

Regards,
cpcfreak.