lubuntu 13.10 failed - no space left on device

[riprop]

...Setting up libclutter-gtk-1.0-0:amd64 (1.4.4-3) ...
Setting up libcheese-gtk23:amd64 (3.8.3-0ubuntu1) ...
Setting up libgnome-bluetooth11 (3.8.1-2ubuntu2) ...
Setting up libgnome-control-center1 (1:3.6.3-0ubuntu45) ...
Setting up gsettings-desktop-schemas (3.8.0-1ubuntu1) ...
Setting up gnome-desktop3-data (3.8.4-0ubuntu1) ...
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
 failed to write status database record about 'libasn1-8-heimdal:i386' to '/var/lib/dpkg/status': No space left on device
/usr/sbin/localepurge: line 114: echo: write error: No space left on device
Error in function:

A fatal error occurred

Please report this as a bug and include the files
/var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log and /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log in
your report. The upgrade has aborted.
Your original sources.list was saved in
/etc/apt/sources.list.distUpgrade.

SystemError: E:Problem executing scripts DPkg::Post-Invoke 'if [ -x
/usr/sbin/localepurge ] && [ $(ps w -p $PPID | egrep -c
'(remove|purge)') != 1 ]; then /usr/sbin/localepurge; else exit 0;
fi', E:Sub-process returned an error code, E:Sub-process
/usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/apport/apport-gtk", line 589, in <module>
    app = GTKUserInterface()
  File "/usr/share/apport/apport-gtk", line 48, in __init__
    apport.ui.UserInterface.__init__(self)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/ui.py", line 186, in __init__
    self.crashdb = apport.crashdb.get_crashdb(None)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/crashdb.py", line 822, in get_crashdb
    with open(conf) as f:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/apport/crashdb.conf'
Error in sys.excepthook:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport_python_hook.py", line 140, in apport_excepthook
    pr.write(f)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/problem_report.py", line 321, in write
    file.write(v.replace(b'\n', b'\n '))
OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport_python_hook.py", line 140, in apport_excepthook
    pr.write(f)
OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

Original exception was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/apport/apport-gtk", line 589, in <module>
    app = GTKUserInterface()
  File "/usr/share/apport/apport-gtk", line 48, in __init__
    apport.ui.UserInterface.__init__(self)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/ui.py", line 186, in __init__
    self.crashdb = apport.crashdb.get_crashdb(None)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/crashdb.py", line 822, in get_crashdb
    with open(conf) as f:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/apport/crashdb.conf'

Could not install the upgrades

The upgrade has aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A
recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a).

Please report this bug in a browser at
http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+filebug
and attach the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/ to the bug report.
installArchives() failed

dpkg: error: failed to write status database record about 'libasn1-8-heimdal:i386' to '/var/lib/dpkg/status': No space left on device
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./xorg_fix_proprietary.py", line 156, in <module>
    shutil.copy(XORG_CONF, backup)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/shutil.py", line 119, in copy
    copyfile(src, dst)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/shutil.py", line 84, in copyfile
    copyfileobj(fsrc, fdst)
IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

Upgrade complete

The upgrade has completed but there were errors during the upgrade
process.

To continue please press [ENTER]

[riprop (riprop)]

Hello,

update failed, no space left on HDD even I make more space than requested on start.
Upgrade is space inefficient, it could delete packages which are already installed during process, so smaller space is required. Also download files could be opitnaly on separate device.

What is status of my linux now , will it work after restart ? I make more space now, what should I do to repair , continue or restart upgrade ? How many work for upgrade is left ?

Thank you !

BR

[Peter Cordes (peter-cordes)]

Try df -i. You might have run out of inodes if you're using ext4, where you have to allocate space for inodes at FS creation time. This happened to me when upgrading 12.04 to 14.04. I got a no space left on device error while a postinst script was running for something. I'm still worried I might not have reinstalled all affected packages :/

peter@tesla:~$ df -ih
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 428K 321K 108K 75% /
...
/dev/sdb3 50M 359K 50M 1% /var/tmp

 I use xfs for most of my filesystems, but ext4 for my / and /home. Removing a couple -docs packages that had tens of thousands of files each, and some old kernel modules / headers packages, freed up 100k inodes. (It used to be slightly inconvenient to get grub to boot from xfs, compared to other filesystems. I could probably just use xfs for everything now, esp. with XFS's performance improvements in the past few years to metadata-heavy workloads, like creating / deleting lots of small files.)

 ubuntu-docs is really a big offender for inode consumption, with massive amounts of files and symlinks like
/usr/share/help/C/ubuntu-help/clock.page
Every symlink is a separate inode, unlike hardlinks. (not that I'm suggesting packages should install hardlinks, just that using the FS as a database has its downsides, esp. in packages installed by default.)

 Luckily for me, English is my native language, and I don't think I ever looked at any of the locally-installed Ubuntu docs, so I can just remove as many internationalization packages as possible to minimize space usage and the amount of stuff that gets downloaded / updated.