Trying to install an application causes crash if no free space

[Wladston Viana]

Binary package hint: synaptic

I've tryed to install Eclipse on my Ubuntu instalation. I'm running the 6.06 LTS version.

There was not enought free space to install Eclipse, but the installer application gladly begun to download the files. I got system messages showing that the space was getting critical, and in the meanwhile, I've moved all my personal files to the pen drive.

When it started installing, disk usage reached 100% and I have received an error message from the installer application.

From it on, I've tried to open the "Add/Remove..." application again to remove eclipse, but It would not open, saying that it couldn't copy permissions. Since I had no files to delete, I've decided to reboot the system.

After the reboot, I wasn't able to login with my user account, on the normal screen. After typing the password, it returned to the login screen.

I had to go back to windows to go to IRC ask help, and found that I needed to login on the command mode (crtl+alt +f1) and type sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoclean.

My suggestions are :
1.Show the ammount of space needed to install an application
2.Don't allow the user to install an application he does not have space to hold
3.Reserve some system space to allow basic operations on the computer, when there is no more disk space

Thanks for the attention, and congratulations for the good work!

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

It is quite hard to make sure that there is enough space, since the user could use several different mount points for his file system and we don't know how much space the installed packages requires in each directory.

The problem is that the packages are downloaded as root. And root is allowed to fill up the file system completely. We could only check if the package could be downloaded safely.

I will take a look at mvo's code in the dist-upgrade tool.

[Wladston Viana (wladston)]

Ok... Well, some ideas that come in my head :

A deamon that checks for free space? During instalation, the user could at least be warned that if he does not mount partitions to make up more X.XMB, the system won't be able to install ?

A /.panic file, that can be mounted as an emergency filesystem when there is no free space?

[Dominik Stadler (dominik-stadler)]

This is closely related to Bug 312491 where better error reporting for out-of-space situations is discussed.

[Anzenketh (anzenketh)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 312491, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.