Comment 5 for bug 1089195

I've a Dell Inspiron mini which came with Ubuntu installed. It's running 12.04 lts and does very little apart from tv listings and monitoring email (it's too small for regular use). Yet it ran out of inodes as shown by df -i when the drive was about half-full according to df -h.

This borked my ability to update packages and resulted in aptitude reporting broken packages after an update attempt. Worse, it became impossible to login to a graphical desktop. To recover, I needed to boot into text mode by amending the grub boot-up commands and deleting /tmp to free up sufficient inodes to allow the graphical desktop to load ok. Then I used synaptic to delete the old linux-headers. The result was inode usage dropped to a more reasonable 54%.

So yeah, untold numbers of Ubuntu installations are in danger of mysteriously stopping working because ubuntu does not tidy up after itself when installing new kernels.