Hey all,
I had a problem over the last 3 days that I finally solved. This might help others that have similar issues.
Behavior: X windowing system would fail to come up correctly when logging into my account or any time the X server restarted. Any time I hit <Ctrl>-<Alt>-<Bckspc> to restart the server I would get chaos, as though my hsync and vsync were incorrect in my Xorg.conf file. I was able to log in using the Safe login, but on logging out, when the windowing system would attempt to restart, I would get the failure.
This system had been stable for over a year prior to this unhappy behavior.
The last thing I did before the troubles began was to ask Audacity (a sound editor) to edit a file that proved too big for my system to handle.
After much fiddling about, some very inventive cursing, and preparing to rebuild the system, I noted that nroff was unable to render a man page for me siting a lack of /tmp space. Odd. I did a ‘df -h’ and found my /tmp partition to be %99 full.
It seems Audacity had occupied the entire /tmp directory in trying to do my bidding leaving insufficient room for the windowing system to configure it’s temporary files and rise from the ashes.
Solution: Clear out unused files in /tmp to make more space.
There were no error messages of note in the Xorg.0.log file or in system messages. So, this is a bit hard to diagnose.
Hope this helps some other person with a similar problem.
If the moderators feel this is inappropriate for ‘hardware’ please see to it that it finds the right home. thanks
Generically Human
