What about a deamon warning the user when disk is full ?

[PoluX]

Hi,

My little sister is running Ubuntu for some years. And she's representative of lambda users which doesn't verify the size of a file before downloading it ;-)

I don't think that Ubuntu is bug-free, but I have to emphasise that administrating her system is quasi pain-free : I mainly have to do major upgrades (Ubuntu versions).

In fact I realize that a few times she ask me about some «bug» (as for example : «the computer don't want to download photo from camera...»), it was relied to the same thing : its partition was full (root or home), leading to the malfunctioning of many software used by her.

Since some end users (as my little sister ;-) doesn't have the reaction to verify their disk usage (and one can think that they don't *want* to do it), and since it should be easy to do this automatically, why not thinking about a deamon simply warning users when free space become too light ?

I am not developer, but I wanted to advertise Ubuntu community about this problem, because in fact that one which come back regularly within all the end-users people that I help to use Gnu.

(given answer from https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/73525 )
> Maybe something already exists to monitor disk space You could impose disk quotas to keep data down.

Hum, I think that's not a suitable solution for end users. Because what happen when quota are full ? The problem will still be the same : many users applications which requires storage have non determined behaviour when they can't open or write a file (ok that's bad but that's true and verifiable), and this situation is a major source of malfunctioning for the user. Ubuntu should provides tools which detect this situation and warn the user, as it already provides tools which detect each new correction of any software.

[Asif Youssuff (yoasif)]

Thank you for taking the time to make Ubuntu better. Since what you submitted is a Feature Request to improve Ubuntu, you are invited to post your idea in Ubuntu Brainstorm at https://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ where it can be discussed, voted by the community and reviewed by developers. Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion!

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

gnome-settings-daemon already monitors disk usage and alerts the user when free space gets to 5%. However, it doesn't work correctly in Jaunty, but is already fixed upstream

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

This is fixed in Karmic now

gnome-settings-daemon (2.27.3-0ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

 * New upstream version:
   - Make the RANDR tray icon's per-monitor labels explicitly black
   - Include config.h so that the notifications code in housekeeping plugin can
     actually be built
   - Use "screen reader" instead of "screenreader" in schema
   - Lots of RANDR fixes and improvements
   - Nicer handling of broken XKB configuration in gconf
   - Make 'locate pointer' deal with wm/cm changes
   - Be more careful when comparing two key structs
 * debian/patches/02_fix_randr.patch:
   - new version update