[NTLUG:Discuss] Kubuntu upgrade question

[Stuart Johnston]

On a desktop system, I usually do one partition for /home and one for / 
(everything else).  Just make sure you've got plenty of space on / and 
then you don't have to worry about /var vs. /usr, etc.

If you use LVM for your partitioning, it is much easier to resize your 
partitions without completely reformatting.

As for your immediate problem, you should try booting in single user 
mode or recovery if your grub has that option.  That should allow you to 
boot and clean things up.



Wayne Dahl wrote:
> Never saw this show up on the list, not sure why...but resending...
> 
> This may be a stupid question, but every time I do something involving
> partitioning a hard drive, I never seem to get /var big enough and I
> have problems later...like, is there a way to tell Adept or Synaptic to
> download upgrade files to a different directory than /var/****?  I
> increased /var to 2.9Gigs last time I had to partition my hard drives
> (when I installed a new 300Gig SATA drive) and again, I find it's not
> enough.  I'm attempting to upgrade my AMD64 box from Kubuntu 5.10 Breezy
> Badger to Dapper Drake.  I've got all the repostories set up, started
> the upgrade, Adept happily started downloading files and I went to watch
> TV.  I came back later to find it had SIGSEV'd, so I started it again
> and went back to watching TV.  When I checked it later, Adept had
> crashed again.  I tried to restart it, it attempted to download 1 file
> and crashed.  I tried Synaptic, thinking it was something I had done to
> Adept, it crashed too.  I went back to Adept trying to see which file it
> was crashing on, never could...when it hit me.  I checked /var to find
> it was full.
> 
> Now, I have over 130Gigs of available space on /usr and I would REALLY
> like to have Adept download the files to a directory there where I have
> plenty of space instead of /var, where I don't.  Any ideas other than
> repartitioning my HD's and reinstalling?  I might do that anyway, but
> I'd like to see if there's another way to do this.
> 
> After sending the above message, I turned off that machine and now I
> have a much bigger problem.  I'm assuming the issue is that since /var
> is full, when the machine attempts to start the MySQL daemon, it fails
> and the machine stops the boot sequence and hangs.  I've attempted to
> boot the machine with the live CD I installed the OS from originally,
> but didn't have much time to deal with it and didn't see the filesystem
> on the hard drive (I'm assuming the fstab would need to be modified to
> access the hard drive to try removing those packages from /var to create
> some space so the machine will finish booting up) and maybe I'm
> completely barking up the wrong tree.  The machine boots up just fine
> from the live CD, but like I said, at the time, I didn't have much time
> to try messing with it.
> 
> Any ideas/help would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Wayne 
> 
> 
> 
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