Idea #9444: show warning message when unable to login because partition is full

114

Written by ktulu77 the 3 Jun 08 at 20:51. Category: System.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New

Description

When the /home paritition is full, and we try to login, gdm just don't login and go back to the connection screen.

We have not any informations why the login fails. I know by searching into forums that it is because the partition was full and I just had to remove some files.

This kind of problems is frequent, and a newbie cannot do anything, he must search on google, but without a working session, he cannot do anything.

For me it is a blocking issue.

I propose to show a warning message which explains why we cannot login (partition full, not write access, etc), if we cannot do that at login, do it when the partition has less than 5% space available or something like that.

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Attachments

Bug #50557 : graphical login fails without group execute permission on home directory

Duplicates

[Report a duplicate and merge its votes to this idea]

Comments

andersja wrote on the 4 Jun 08 at 10:42

+1 Great idea; anything to help explain users (expecially less tech-savvy users) why stuff is going wrong is a bonus in my book

Hawke wrote on the 6 Jun 08 at 20:07

Good idea, but it's usually not so good to give an error that the user can't do anything to solve.

IMO it would be far better to:
1. Fix GDM/Gnome so that you can login with a full or unwritable home directory, or
2. After displaying the error, "log in" the user with a minimal session consisting only of a terminal window, a simple/usable file manager, and a logout button. An app similar to Treesize on windows would probably be a good candidate for the file manager.

sf_007 wrote on the 19 Aug 08 at 18:03

I had this problem, it was a crazy thing! I think a good solution was to always have some space reserved for the system (from 10MB to 100 MB or so...)

maxim99 wrote on the 15 Sep 08 at 12:13

Interesting, I haven't encountered this, but I'm sure it should be addressed if it's a real problem. Sounds more like a "bug" though.

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