I had a failed installation of an AUR package yesterday morning with pamac (Gui install) on a Manjaro system with a btrfs system (I am really not yet familiar with this)
Since then I have a lot of problems that I am still trying to solve. The problem is mainly linked with the message “No space left on device”, while the disk is reasonably well maintained and clean. Nevertheless, this morning after the failed install, df -h reported at leat 95% of usage. I also did verify the load of inodes (df -ih) and the percentage of usage is between 1 and 3%!
I have made several rebooting but lightdm fails almost all the time due to this space problem. I did succeed in emptying some cache, remainders of packages and finally did also reinstall nvidia driver that had disappeared. This finally worked and I did relaunch startx successfully.
My work with the PC did remain difficult with an apparent 23% of free drive but still directories that I could not eliminate or rename due to a “lack of space”. With the last relaunch at the end of the day, I did fall back in the terminal and cannot find any way to relaunch the Desktop Environment now…
When pamac installs packages, it keeps a copy of all the old packages you have downloaded. This cache can be very useful if you have to install older packages in an emergency. However, left unchecked, this cache will grow very large over time.
Otherwise, to clear the cache completely, enter the following command (and use with care):
pamac clean
Pamac GUI settings also includes an option to clean cache packages
Sometimes you can also have a lot of logs. you can check via du -h /var/log You can optimize the usage for logs: Optimize journalctl to save server disk space in Linux. You may also install baobab to have a graphical overview what uses how much disk space on your device.
Is your filesystem really full? Mis-balanced metadata and/or data chunks (run btrfs balance)
Is your filesystem really full? Mis-balanced data chunks
Is your filesystem really full? Mis-balanced metadata
Balance cannot run because the filesystem is full (temporarily add a device such as USB key or loop device to the btrfs filesystem using btrfs device add before running btrfs balance)
I am afraid you’re reaping the fruits of the extremely advanced and equally extremely complicated and maintaince intensive btrfs filesystem. Which can run out of space even if it has space, etc. Read all the links above and good luck.
Well, I did go trough the excellent btrfs/manjaro page and followed, adding a usb key - /dev/sdf1 8G - to the original /dev/sda7 and balancing. This gave some air to the system indeed.
I did try to reboot, I have to manually indicate to look for sda in order to load grub, go trough it and get an alert like Failed to mount 'UUID=5a....' on real root, ... emergency shell
This shell does not give me much possibilities but I can check that fstab
is correctly set with the UUID corresponding to the bundle
I would like to try to remove the usb from the btrfs bundle (btrfs device remove …) but the command does not exist in my limited emergency shelll
I will have try trough another linux then
Yes, but this is more or less the default option when reinstalling manjaro now, I had to do that 2 or 3 months ago and was quite surprised but remained confident with the proposal of Manjaro’s team
Should I reinstall???
It is the default now and i have my personal opinion if it is a “sane” default since it requires a university degree to properly manage as you now experience yourself. But it is what it is.
Manjaro ISOs include gparted partitioning tool so partitions can be formatted before running installer
calamares manual install option also has a built-in partitioning tool
All installer options have a summary screen to show which filesystem is to be used before user is requested to allow installer to make changes to system
I have made several install’s of linux and this time I have been badly surprised by the calamares.
In fact I have not been able to make the more classical manual install that I like, on a previously formated partition…
Hope this was a temporary situation.
Me personally i don’t trust calamares installer with that task. I do the partitions as i wish with gparted and than just point the installer to mount them.
