Comment 10 for bug 35217

I agree that this should be assigned a higher priority,

Why, yes, it did catch me last night :)

It's made worse by the behaviour of ext3 when full: you can delete files using 'rm' or 'apt-get clear' *BUT* the free space doesn't increase?!? (Because the journalling system couldn't write anything before making the changes that would give it some space?)

A combination of reboot, oh no, delete some files, reboot, oh no, try deleting via Windows and ext2fs, reboot, oh no, run fschk, delete some files, reboot, oh no, run fschk etc worked. In the end.

But, basically, the behaviour when the file system fills up is Not Good.

I leave it to others to decide what the best solution is - stop the file system getting in this state? Having a specific utility to get free space (e.g. by emptying caches) in such a way that ext3 actually creates some or just increasing the helpfullness of the onscreen messages.

About the only good bit is that, browsing the bug database, it looks like KDE is even worse :/