I started noticing a major problem on my new Dragon 2.0 after copying several gigabytes of video (AVI files) from DVD-ROM to /myth/video in an xterm. Each time I copied a DVD, I would get the prompt back, but it would either freeze or be unresponsive in some other way. Rebooting the system led to a grey screen with a dialog box and this message:

Xsession warning: unable to write to /tmp. X session may exit with an error.

Clicking OK just reboots X and generates the same message.

The first time this happened, I googled the error message and found the suggestion of typing "apt-get clean". I rebooted and it seemed to work. However, after copying another DVD's worth of video to the hard disk (the /myth partition, not the root partition where /tmp is), the same thing happened. Now I can't get X to come up at all.

I tried uninstalling Emacs, thinking I might have filled the root partition when I installed it, with no luck. There does seem to be 300M of room on the root partition, but it sometimes can't be written to:

root@domino:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 4.7G 4.4G 0 100% /
/dev/sda3 460G 45G 415G 10% /myth
tmpfs 1004M 4.0K 1004M 1% /dev/shm

If only 4.4G of 4.7G is used on the root partition, why is only 0 bytes available?

I can touch files on /tmp as the mythtv user with no problem.

I tried creating a new /tmp directory per some other advice I found with Google. I still get the same error.

Any ideas? I can call Mythic.tv tech support tomorrow but I'd like to resolve this tonight.

Thanks!

root@domino:/# ls -lh
total 104K
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Apr 29 16:21 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Apr 26 22:57 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Apr 25 22:17 boot
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Apr 25 21:43 cache
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Apr 26 14:36 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 14K Apr 29 16:21 dev
drwxr-xr-x 101 root root 4.0K Apr 29 16:21 etc
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Apr 25 21:43 home
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Dec 22 20:17 initrd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.5K Nov 4 16:31 knoppmyth
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.6K Oct 31 00:13 knoppmyth-sata
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 8.0K Apr 26 22:57 lib
drwx------ 2 root root 16K Apr 26 14:32 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Nov 28 22:53 media
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Oct 28 2006 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4.0K Apr 25 22:18 myth
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Oct 29 22:54 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 105 root root 0 Apr 29 16:21 proc
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Apr 26 23:27 root
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Apr 26 22:57 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Oct 29 22:54 srv
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 0 Apr 29 16:21 sys
drwxrwxrwt 3 root root 4.0K Apr 29 16:21 tmp
drwxrwxrwt 4 root root 4.0K Apr 29 16:15 tmp.old
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4.0K Dec 10 14:20 usr
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4.0K Nov 1 16:00 var
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Apr 26 14:35 vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-chw-13

Have you checked the log directory? Depending on what version you're running there was a logfile rollover problem with a well known fix.

There was also a problem with the mysql DB using binary logging and consuming a lot of disk space.