Running out of disk space - hint for newbies

I tried to save a file and discovered I had used the entire 7.2GB in my /home partition. Now seeing as I had around 3GB a couple of days ago, and as I keep music, documents and other big files on an entirely separate partition, I was interested to know where the space got to.

A quick look around showed nothing exciting, then I remembered. About a week ago I upgraded to 3.3.1 t01.

There was a problem with a file in some previous releases of simplyMEPIS that ate disk space, so I had a quick look. Sure enough, there was my old enemy, back from the dead!

The file is in your /home/user (user is the name you log in under). To see it, go into file manager and turn ON show hidden files in the View menu.

Look for .xsession-errors and see what size it is. It should be around 30kb to 300kb. Mine was 2.9GB after about 2 weeks.

If yours is getting big, you can quite safely turn it off.

Do the following (you don't have to be root)

Open a terminal and make sure you are un /home/user

Type: rm .xsession-errors

Press: enter

Type: ln -s /dev/null .xsession-errors

Press: enter

This will stop the file growing.

Write this instruction down somewhere because this is an old problem that comes and goes. If it isn;t affecting your current system, there is a chance that a later release of Mepis (or another distro will.

I have seen this file grow to around 10GB in less than a month. As far as I can tell it is a KDE problem, not a MEPIS one, so don;t panic and change distros.

Cheers,

RossD.