[SOLVED] Disk full errors on new install despite disk not being full

Question

Hi,
I just installed Arch on my Thinkpad laptop as a way of trying out the distro. I followed the Beginner's Guide quite closely and used the latest install medium. My system is up to date.
However, I did diverge a bit from the beaten path, as I re-used an old LVM-on-LUKS setup from the previous installation (Debian). It took a while to figure out how to make it work, but I managed and yesterday the machine seemed to run fine. Basically, my modifications to the default setup is adding encrypt and lvm to hooks in mkinitcpio.conf, and adding a kernel command line to decrypt my LUKS device containing the LVM volume to /etc/defaults/grub (this was tricky to figure out, by the way, since all documentation I could find spoke of the now-deprecated rc.conf). All that seems to work fine; the computer now boots and mounts root as expected.
However, today when I started the laptop, I noticed that the password dialog in GDM wouldn't load. When I looked into the logs, I found that I had mostly the same problems as described in this thread, but the strange thing is that I'm not low on disk space:
deanna% df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs 303565176 17339120 270805848 7% /
dev 953648 0 953648 0% /dev
run 957312 488 956824 1% /run
/dev/mapper/deanna-root 303565176 17339120 270805848 7% /
tmpfs 957312 96 957216 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 957312 0 957312 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 957312 212 957100 1% /tmp
/dev/sda1 240972 34562 193969 16% /boot
So I thought I'd run into some bug, but then it turned out that systemctl scripts started complaining about lack of disk space, and then I got concerned:
deanna% sudo systemctl start gdm.service
Error: No space left on device
deanna% sudo systemctl status gdm.service
gdm.service - GNOME Display Manager
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/gdm.service; enabled)
Active: active (running) since Thu, 2012-12-20 11:17:03 CET; 41s ago
Main PID: 1964 (gdm-binary)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/gdm.service
├─1964 /usr/sbin/gdm-binary
├─1968 /usr/lib/gdm/gdm-simple-slave --display-id /org/gnome/DisplayManager/Displays/_0
├─1971 /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -background none -verbose -auth /var/run/gdm/auth-for-gdm-ZOCjk8/database -seat se...
├─1981 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-launch-environment]
└─2051 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
Dec 20 11:17:03 deanna systemd[1]: Starting GNOME Display Manager...
Dec 20 11:17:03 deanna systemd[1]: Started GNOME Display Manager.
Dec 20 11:17:04 deanna gdm-simple-slave[1968]: WARNING: Failed to give slave programs access to the display. Trying to proceed.
Dec 20 11:17:17 deanna gdm-password][2051]: AccountsService-WARNING: Failed to monitor logind session changes: No spac...device
deanna%
Any help debugging would be greatly appreciated. Also, I may have missed something since I'm new to Arch. Not a new GNU/Linux user however, so you'd think I'd not manage to blow everything up.
Last edited by albins (2012-12-28 13:56:30)

Answer 1

No:
deanna% df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 290G 17G 259G 7% /
dev 932M 0 932M 0% /dev
run 935M 516K 935M 1% /run
/dev/mapper/deanna-root 290G 17G 259G 7% /
tmpfs 935M 76K 935M 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 935M 0 935M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 935M 216K 935M 1% /tmp
/dev/sda1 236M 34M 190M 16% /boot
Also, I just dd:d up a 1.5 GB file from /dev/zero into my home directory without any problems.
Last edited by albins (2012-12-21 08:48:35)