I came back from holidays to find my myth box not working.

Basically, X couldn't start because it couldn't write to /tmp (couldn't write to the temp directory)
there was a message to this, and an okay box.

Annoyingly, pressing the okay box meant that something tried to restart X resulting in a loop. Very annoyingly I couldn't switch to another virtual terminal or ssh to the box to fix the problem!

Luckily if you continued the loop enough times eventually it had enough of restarting X and you get a 5 minute break.

Then I realised the root directory was full, and a little look around found a very large .xsession-error file under /home/mythtv/ deleting this file fixes the problem.

Any ideas on what caused this problem? my gf told me there was something about requiring a password?? which there shouldn't have been.

And why did it not let me switch terminals?????

Because the root partition was full. Duh!

I had that problem a few times, but enabling frontend logging fixed it. What version are you using? I think that to enable frontend logging (which sends the majority of the errors, which are frontend errors) you just have to touch the file /var/log/mythtv/mythfrontend.log. I thought it was enabled by default on R5F1.

Alternatively stick the .xsession-errors in /var/log/mythtv/ and make a symlink in /home/mythtv/.xsession-errors, or disable logging.

After cleaning the file up, there are a few other things that will be broken. You will find that mysql's tables will have corrupted as well and you'll have to fix it or you won't be able to start the backend.

Good luck.

Mike

_________________
*********************
LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
*********************