[PLUG] Broken root!

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:15:02 -0700 (PDT)
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> dijo:

> On Thu, 19 Apr 2007, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic as user root.
> > Unable to copy the user's Xauthorization file.
> >
> > What happened?

> Drew said:
> open a terminal and see if you can sudo to root ... if you can then as your
>regular user type again in a prompt xhost + and then try clicking the icon
> again ...

That didn't work because I couldn't sudo to root. :(

> It's likely your hostname change, and your X auth became invalid. 
> Log out of your X session, restart X (typically Ctrl+Alt+Bksp), and 
> login again.

So next I tried Paul's suggestion. I did Ctrl-Alt-Bkspc and got a login
prompt except that the screen was jiggling and the Ubuntu login
drumbeat was continous. I concluded that this was not a good sign. :) 

I tried Ctrl-Alt-Bkspc again, but got the same results. The login
screen does have an Options menu, and one of its options was Restart.
So I restarted, and when the login screen came up I got:

"GDM could not write to your authorization file. This could mean that
you are out of disk space or that your home directory could not be
opened for writing. In any event, it's not possible to log in. Please
contact your system administrator."

Great. Unfortunately, I guess the system administrator is me.

However, when I read that error message I remembered that the backup
was almost complete when suddenly I got about 20-30 messages that it
could not continue because it was out of disk space. Aha! Except that I
could swear that I later went in and deleted a Linux ISO that I really
didn't need. Except maybe I thought I did and really didn't. Oh well, no
problem, I'll just free up some disk space so I'm sure there is lots of
room.

But how to do that? Well, I started with a Knoppix CD, and it
automounted the partitions. Except it didn't really. It did not see the
RAID 1 partition that Feisty is installed on. It did see the underlying
partitions on each disk. So I thought I would just delete the same
thing -- something big -- off of each disk. But that failed because,
while Knoppix wasn't smart enough to see the RAID 1 partition, it *was*
smart enough not to let me muck around in the individual ext3
partitions, even if I did so as root. So now I'm sitting here trying to
think of a live CD to use that would understand RAID partitions. 

Anyone need a computer mucked up? Call JJJ's professional computer
screwup service. I'll make sure it won't even boot! Guaranteed!

I haven't done anything with the Feisty installation other than make
the backup, so push come to shove I can just start over. But if anyone
has any idea how to delete something off the RAID 1 partition when I
can't log in, please share. :)