[SOLVED] Last update broke KDE4 in work laptop

[Georgetoon]

I'm not trying to tell someone how to spend their money but....why not just buy a PCXLinuxOS system?  Weric at Linpc.us has some amazing deals.

[joechimp]

I'm not trying to tell someone how to spend their money but....why not just buy a PCXLinuxOS system?  Weric at Linpc.us has some amazing deals.

That sounds great but I want to learn more first and find out what caused this or other problems. If I learn how to fix this and other problems I will be that much farther along in knowing what the hell I am doing. Then maybe help someone else down the line.

Thank you though. It seems like they offer a good system.

[joechimp]

This is what Tex told me was wrong.

E: You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/.


Is there a way to increase this size. I never had a problem before. I thought I had plenty of room for updates and expansion.

[ElCuervo]

Certainly there are ways to increase partition sizes. The first step is to know what we're dealing with, though, and df is a good tool to get that info. Here's a sample:

[alan@chickens ~]$ df
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6              15G  6.4G  7.4G  47% /
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda7              76G   56G   21G  74% /home
/dev/sda2             271G  197G   75G  73% /media/Chix2-1
/dev/sda1              98G   14G   85G  14% /media/Chix1
192.168.1.2:/Backup   1.4T  811G  587G  59% /mnt/Backup
192.168.1.2:/home/alan
                       68G   51G   18G  75% /mnt/dog8it/alan
/dev/sdb1             977M  345M  633M  36% /media/TOSHIBA1G02

[joechimp]

Of course at this point , the point may be moot.
The persistence part of this flash drive is now corrupted. I need to fix that first. I would like to  fix it for the learning experience before being forced to recreate another flash drive.

I am typing this now using the same drive in the live mode/no persistence. So it works but no persistence.
It is beyond my current knowledge as to why this is.

Thanks to all that have tried to help me. I use PCLINUXOS full time now. I haven't gone back and forth with Windows now for maybe 6 months now. NOTHING will keep me from using this fine distro.......well unless it is my own stupidity.

Tex must just shake his head when he sees dumb ass problems like I have....created by my inexperience.  

[joechimp]

Certainly there are ways to increase partition sizes. The first step is to know what we're dealing with, though, and df is a good tool to get that info. Here's a sample:

[alan@chickens ~]$ df
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6              15G  6.4G  7.4G  47% /
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda7              76G   56G   21G  74% /home
/dev/sda2             271G  197G   75G  73% /media/Chix2-1
/dev/sda1              98G   14G   85G  14% /media/Chix1
192.168.1.2:/Backup   1.4T  811G  587G  59% /mnt/Backup
192.168.1.2:/home/alan
                       68G   51G   18G  75% /mnt/dog8it/alan
/dev/sdb1             977M  345M  633M  36% /media/TOSHIBA1G02

Oh yes, I forgot to post that. You asked yesterday.

[guest@localhost guest]$ df
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root             612M  180M  433M  30% /
/dev/sda2              53G   49G  4.3G  92% /media/disk
[guest@localhost guest]$

I'm not sure how I got this strange result. I have an 8GB flash drive and have more than half empty last I checked. I created it as per johnboy's tutorial with one partition.This isn't my first flash that I have created. The ones in the past have worked just the way I wanted them too.

The second listing is the dead hard drive I still have in my laptop. I still am able to store stuff on it but it has too many bad sectors to use for anything else.

[ElCuervo]

Wow. It looks like you may have to spend some money on a new HD, or see if running DBAN on that flaky one you have will make it more reliable so you can use it. My 15GB / directory seems barely large enough to do any real computer work, and as you can see, it is half full. Granted, I have quite a pile of packages on there, but just the base installation needs quite a bit of room.

At the very least you need to find out where your 8GB went. You may also want to try PCC>Local disk partitions>Manage disks to see if it shows up there and if you can see a partition problem.

[joechimp]

I may or may not get a new hard drive for this particular laptop. It's one I use for the specific purpose of running the flash drive on.

It still tells me in properties that half the drive is empty, so I don't know why it chose to shrink the changes file.

[joechimp]

Device: sdb1
Volume label: LiveOS

Type: Journalised FS: ext3 (0x83)
Start: sector 32
Size: 7.5GB (99%), 15729616 sectors
Cylinder 0 to 979
Mounted
Partition booted by default
    (for MS-DOS boot, not for lilo)

[Old-Polack]

Tex must just shake his head when he sees dumb ass problems like I have....created by my inexperience.  

If he doesn't, I do it for him.

Don't be so hard on yourself. Anyone here that says he never created a dumb ass problem, due to his own ignorance at the time, is a bald faced liar. We've all done it. Not the same one, but we each have a few we remember. Those dumb ass problems are the ones we learn the most from, if we fix them, rather than give up, or automatically re-install. Every blown system, every borked application, every dumb unintentional deletion, is an opportunity to learn something new. 

[joechimp]

Thank you OP. I appreciate the words. Even the shaking your head.

The problem I have is that the flash drive is beyond corrupted. Even if I was to find someway to boot back into persistence, I have lost much in the bad update of KDE. Somehow my partitions are messed up as well.

Most times if anyone has read my posts, I always try to work through a problem. It's the only way to learn more.
Sometimes a problem is worth more to the learning experience than if you did it perfectly the first time. Let me change that to ALL the time.

Anyway, I took someone's earlier advice and did a regular install to the flash drive. Made 3 partitions swap, /home, and /, and  am using it as we speak.

Remember not everyone is on the same page when it comes to experience. I use PCLINUXOS everyday. It is my only OS for awhile now. I used to jump back and forth between Windows and Linux and now I don't feel the need to.

I have learned much since just using PCLINUXOS. No falling back on Windows for any reason. If I don't know how to do something, I come here and ask. One should never be embarrassed to ask questions. I sometimes feel foolish when the answer is obvious and I just didn't see it, but so be it. Not a big deal.

Anyway, thank you to all that helped me. Hope I can return the favor one day.

[joechimp]

Well, even thought the install was working ok there were a few things that seemed to slow it down. I redid it using one partition and it is working great. It is fast both in boot up and operation. I am very pleased with the results.
This method seems to speed everything up. As opposed to the live usb with persistence. My impression anyway.
It does take a little bit more room on the flash drive. Not an issue currently. We'll see down the road.

Thanks again everyone. 

Hope anyone else who had their laptop "broke" is now up and running.

[Mark342]

Good, I hope everyone else is ok now. 

For future reference:
From my experience, when running a live session changes are kept in RAM.
Seems you didn't have enough free ram to keep the packages in.

I know because I have tried installing new packages while running a livecd with only 1GB of ram in the computer.
And a liveusb (without persistence) is just a livecd that runs from a usb drive.

[joechimp]

Thank you.

I do know live sessions are kept in ram. I was not running a live session. I had it configured for persistence as I do all my flash drives.
However this is the first time I had this problem. Previous live usb's with persistence I have created have had plenty of room and was not an issue. I was able to update and add whatever I needed.
Despite what my readings were, I had almost 4+Gb of space left. Somehow it was not delegated to the changes.

Anyway it is done now. 

Thanks again.

[Crow]

        I'm happy now       

Just updated my PCLOS (a remaster I installed when the problem arose) and finally KDE is working fine.