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This is imo one of the most important issues to consider if Ubuntu is "Linux for human beings".
Most of the human beings are newbies, and most of the people that arrive to Ubuntu come from windows and use a dual boot system, so the disk resources may be limited.
People aren't used to look at the available disk space and start using programs as DVD rippers and p2p networks with the default configuration (/home/$user) so running out of space becomes a huge problem when it happens.
A warning when de disk space is running out and the ability to stop the disk operation when the target media hasn't enough free space would be great.
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melaren
wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 20:11
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Sounds good, as long as we don't start adding notifications for everything. ...it would be nice to see something other than a bubble notification.
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While I agree with your concern, melaren, that we would want to minimize notifications (lest we become Ubuntu Vista), I think that this is a very valid addition.
Currently, if you fill up your files system, the system cannot boot to a desktop until you delete something at the command line. While this is easy enough for the *nix savvy, it would be terrifying for a non-techie. Also, in single computer environments, it may become difficult to get to user support.
I feel that a notification should be made, as the file system is filling up (97% or so). Also, since those most affected by full disks are avid torrenters, I think it would be beneficial to put a stop command in a final warning, when there is just enough disk space to restart the desktop, so the user has to click to approve to completely fill up the file system. This should only deprive him the last couple of megs, but it would save quite a headache.
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jsnow
wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 23:57
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It should also not be the case that a poorly-written device driver can make stuff break by emitting large volumes of spurious printk messages, until the system logs consume all available space on the root partition.
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ordago
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 00:08
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In Gnome, the avalible disk space is shown at the left-bottom corner in the Nautilus windows.
I agree about the notification, but we should be able to turn it off.
I just want to point that.
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hackel
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 04:19
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Though I am a very experienced Linux user, I have been hit by this many times myself. You run out of disk space after queuing up too many files to download, and then everything stops working--firefox, pidgin, etc. This is enough trouble, let alone when trying to reboot with a full disk.
I believe there needs to be some low-level way to monitor processes which are rapidly eating up your disk space, and either kill them or give them an access denied/read-only message once there is only, say, 50M free. You'd have to be able to configure which partitions it monitors, but there are sensible defaults.
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[-1] Ubuntu already does this, no?
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Also be aware that quota's should be checked.
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oxJelly
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 12:54
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/var/cache is a good place that can be cleared out, particularly /var/cache/apt. Perhaps something can be added to the boot process that clears this out if there isn't enough disk space to boot?
It won't always help of course (if it's empty) but I'd say that for the vast majority of times it will. I'd guess that it would be a really simple thing to implement too?
- Jelly.
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Yes, this is a very good idea. I have been caught out by this a couple of times (one was my incremental backup, not being very incremental). I found that I could no longer log into X.
I had to come into the machine via SSH and clear out the backups before I could log back on.
If this had been my GF or mother/father then it would have been a disaster.
I agree that there is no need for it to become Ubuntu Vista where it asks/tells you about every little thing to the point of getting in the way of actually doing anything, but I do think a notification system for disc space (configurable) would be a good idea.
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I have been waiting for a system which would properly handle the trash. Like the real trash, I hate taking it out. What I wish is that it would just automatically empty itself from the bottom down (FIFO) when I ran out of disk space. This actually isn't very hard to imagine at the OS level; when an application asks to write some data, and the OS asks the filesystem driver and discovers that there is no room, instead of returning a failure immediately it should simply let that request wait while it looks into making some space. If the program requesting the write has non-blocking I/O, then no one will be hurt by this; if it doesn't, only it and its dependents will be upset. Regardless, at this time you try to free up some space. If you can, then you do it and then go ahead and ask the filesystem driver to allocate the space again (I'm imagining all this - I don't know how it REALLY works today, so please no flame-broiling thank you) and then life continues. In this way, you would never have to actually delete anything! You'd never actually unlink() anything unless you really wanted it GONE, instead of rm you might 'trash' files. The OS could also handle secure deletion, the daemon could also maintain a safe margin of free space to avoid thrashing (Especially if you're doing secure deletion!) and even delete out-of-order when deleting some other file takes too long.
I've been waiting and waiting for some OS to do this. The closest I've seen is XP, and it just ruins you by running this horribly inefficient and thrashy wizard program when you're probably already thrashing, and it doesn't do the most important part either.
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Ubuntu already has the notification afaik. It does not offer what to do with the problem (starting the disk space analyzer that is installed could be good first step) though.
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Hagar
wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 23:59
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@ rawsausage
If it has why my girl and one of my friends killed their ubuntu this way? There were not able to login into X because there was not enough hdd space. That could be really huge problem for some people.
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aruseni
wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 00:37
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No, it's the Windows way. The user should check it [him/her]self. Linux can work with 0 bytes of free space, after all.
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dendron
wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 18:37
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In Xubuntu you can add widgets to measure your free space and alert you if necessary. So -1.
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This definetly needs to be added. Over the last year and a half since I set my friend up with a cheap laptop and installed Ubuntu on it, basically the only thing that goes wrong is related to this. After a while she fills the HD with whatever and then can't login. She brings the laptop to me and I have to delete stuff from the command line so she can use the PC again. It's embarrassing. Users really shouldn't have to keep an eye out for space. Notifications can be turned off by users who don't want them, but it should be on by default.
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Doesn't Gnome have a warning notification? But by default it is set to such a low level that it seems that only a root process' writes can trigger it.
Go into Gconf-editor and /desktop/volume_manager and change the "percent_threshold" value to a higher value - 7% or something like that.
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I would LOVE to see this feature. More than once, I have had to boot to command line mode to try to delete stuff because I couldn't log into X. The worst part was that one of those times I was using Edubuntu, and booting it during a presentation to a school network administrator about switching to Linux. While he was waiting, I had to boot into command line mode, but then couldn't remember the password. (There were two users, and I always logged in under the lower-privileged user.) It took me 45 minutes to remember the password, log in, and remove some packages. Do you honestly think I was taken seriously?
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I have already seen these warnings, and I use feisty.
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egroj
wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 15:07
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I hate those warnings, and I think gnome shows it, but I did disable them.
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Ok, right. Ubuntu going "Hey, listen!" every once whould be as anoying as windows' UAC. But then again, not telling user and simply slapping them an error on their face whould be nearly as wrong a choice (hell, I don't want to use a Mac clone that never tell me when it's doing something important; I switched to linux because I wanted to thrust my computers).
Make it an icon on the system tray, just like the update manager or the icoon that appears when the kernel is updated and a reboot is needed. Doesn't get in the way, is informative enough, and does it's job.
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In my oppinion, it's more important to address the problem of X not starting with the disk is full rather than concentrating in a warning.
So the system should avoid to become unresponsive because of the disk space. Of course you can't simply stop silently any disk write activity. In such case a warning window should be displayed.
But, I repeat, more important is to avoid the full disk issues.
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Moderators, please close this. The problem doesn't exist, at least not in Gutsy Gibbon. Please close this.
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zooounds
wrote on the 13 Mar 08 at 19:22
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Hardy has a solution for this I think.
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gedeon
wrote on the 21 Apr 08 at 09:39
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I personally wouldn't mind a notification when the disk is nearly full as long as I can easily turn it off (or configure the % of free space before the notification happens).
But what I think is *vital* is to keep the system usable even when the disk is full (even after a reboot). The most irritating problem being the trashing configuration files when the disk is being actively "filled". By that I mean that many programs apparently try to write their configuration file at a fixed interval, but when the disk is full, that write somehow fails (even though there was no change!?) and the file ends up being 0 bytes long, effectively trashing all my settings. It remember that happened at least for gaim (pidgin) and xchat. There were also others but I can't remember for sure.
It happened to me at least twice since I've started using Linux full time 10 years ago.
Honestly, I'm not sure the problem still exist since I haven't had a disk full on my home partition for quite some time (but the problem has been around for years so it might as well still be there). Also, I don't know if something can be done globally, or if it should be fixed in each application. Nevertheless, if it's not fixed yet, FIX it.
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Excellent idea. A professor at my university formats his hard drive into two partitions, one for windows and program files, and the other for all of his actual work, data, and what not. He recently told me that he has to completely repartition his hard drive and install everything again when he wants to give more space to the "C" drive.
I showed him gparted, and we had things fixed in about 45 minutes (500 gb hard drive mostly full mind you).
He has agreed to put Ubuntu on a spare computer to mess around with, having a feature like this would help a lot!
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Mishtal
wrote on the 19 May 08 at 05:06
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@ tomplast2 and other commentors who feel this is already implemented. Id like to say that i regularly fill my disks up with downloaded files (i only have available a 100 gig harddrive on my laptop and a small external drive for backups and some archived documents) and have never once received a warning about low disk space.
Id like to propose that Ubuntu actively reserve some space for these types of situations. every time i fill my disk (have a sys and home partition) everything halts and i cant use any graphical programs until i free several megabytes.
in terms of the notification, it would be my preference that i be given an option that once ive hit a certain percentage of free space write premission of certain programs is blocked. (IE uTorrent, firefox DTA, etcetera) (user configured) so that even if i would have otherwise downloaded more than my system can handle, it halts the downloads so none of my GUI programs crash and asks me what to do.
i have a final tomorrow that i need my computer for, if it just so happens that my disk is full when i need to use my laptop, im pretty well SOL...
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grimko
wrote on the 27 Jun 08 at 18:40
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Better than stopping programs when disk space runs low, I think that it would be much better to launch a cleaner application (as root) when clicking the notification message that would allow to run optionnal actions such as free apt cache folder, empty trash etc...
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A notification icon or bubble is definetly better than not being able to boot, no matter how Vista-like the notification may be.
Maybe it would even be possible for Ubuntu to have a 10MB or so file that is created on every boot and deleted on every shutdown so the user is always able to boot, no matter how hard he tries to fill up his HDD
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masoris
wrote on the 19 Aug 08 at 11:04
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Yeah, I need it.
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cubytus
wrote on the 10 Oct 08 at 04:12
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Would be very useful. Perhaps not with a small bubble or small dialog box that the user clicks without reading.
It needs to be a bigger notification, such as turning the screen black and white, because filling up the disk has dramatic consequences: being unable to save that 50-page document in OOo to having stalled torrents.
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Xzoky
wrote on the 15 Oct 08 at 12:43
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For my part I would just need something that tells me my disk is full, so tht I don't have to discover it myself after spending half an hour wondering why my torrents stopped -_-
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Last night I started my ubuntu to send an email! It was the first restart after an update on synaptic!
Then the gnome power manager wont start. The internet wouldn't work. The bookmarks in firefox are missing. The stored emails from thunderbird cannot be restored. Everything seemed to go wrong.
Then with some luck, I managed to get my net working. I searched how to restore firefox bookmarks. Then I found that the restore option wont work. Seems the backup file cannot be read. I am not able to bookmark new pages either. I then went to the bookmarks backups folder and tried to copy the 13.6kb bookmarks backup file in to my homefolder. Then I got an error message "Insufficient disk space!!"
So far I had been blaming the latest updates for everything that went wrong yesterday! Then I realized I had only one thing to blame: No notification of low disk space! I deleted 4 movies ( :( I didn't watch them yet) to free space! But atleast things work perfectly when I restarted my comp!
Please add a simple notification of low disk space! You will save me a great deal of time and energy.
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Endolith
wrote on the 23 Oct 08 at 23:46
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+1!
Running out of disk space hoses your system. There should be a warning well before it happens.
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Some newbies (used to be one) facing a "disk full" message would start removing some of their office documents and pictures, and would spend a lot of time deleting their precious emails little by little, with no effect of course, because they forgot about this sub-sub-directory full of movies.
So in addition to emptying the trash, it would be useful to point to the Disk Usage Analyzer.
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Endolith
wrote on the 21 Apr 09 at 20:50
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@Nicolas_Raoul:
You should propose that as a solution.
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Post your comment
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Blueprint warning-of-disk-being-full:
Ubuntuforums.org thread #409822
