No warning before reboot, when harddrive full

[Sokraates]

Kubuntu 6.10, new installation, no upgrade, KDE 3.5.6 installed.

During a session my /home-partition became full or almost full. There was no warning.

After a reboot KDM started, but I couldn't log in. I would always be thrown back to KDM without any explanation. After a lot of work I figured out, that the /home-partition was full. Starting the desktop from the terminal finally showed a popup, telling me. I had to restart the desktop again to read the message, because the popup was quickly covered by the splashscreen, which then simply hung.

It may be, that the /home-partition was not yet full when I rebooted and that starting of the desktop finally filled it. The problem is, that there was no warning before reboot and the popup didn't appear when I tried to login from KDM.

So either the reporting of a 9x%-full partition is broken or it is missing. The correct solution should be to
1) check the partitions and report, as soon as they become 95% full or more
2) tell the user, that he runs the risk of no longer being able to login
3) modify KDM to show why the login failed or have a dialog-box appear instead of going back to KDM

Of course we don't want 3) to happen, since novice users will have a hard time deleting stuff from the terminal.

[Vassilis Pandis (pandisv)]

Thanks for reporting this. This is a problem shared by gdm as well ( bug 62638 ).

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

This should be fixed with https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/boot-login-with-full-filesystem. If this still occurs in hardy please re-open this report.

Thanks

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

see also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/62638