Ubuntu and File Space

I rarely have any problems with Ubuntu, and those few problems I have are either due to my limited experience with Linux, or some failure of the hardware. But every now-and-then, something puzzling and silly shows up.

I run a copy of Ubuntu on a Lenovo T61 laptop at work, using Wubi to dual-boot between XP and Ubuntu 8.04. Today, though, I tried to boot into Ubuntu and noticed that the network manager, bluetooth, and power management icons didn't load in the top panel. And clicking on the "quit" button would cause the panels to crash. After some fiddling, I found that I could log in to root and everything would work. :/ So I re-installed the power manager, network manager, panels, and some other pieces of Gnome to no avail.

So after a little Ubuntu forum scanning, I figured I'd try to backup and then wipe out the Gnome2 configuration files. It is at this point that I need to point out that although nothing had changed on the computer, something had happened that worried me. Just before my problems, I was moving my laptop from one table to another and it slipped out of my hands. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem - Lenovos are tough laptops. But it would just so happen that I had something plugged into one of the USB ports, and it became completely crushed and warped. And it was a pretty hard impact (on carpet). And the computer was on. I was absolutely afraid I had corrupted something.

Anyway, when I attempted to backup the Gnome2 config files (these files are all the personalization settings for Gnome that are tied to each individual login), I found I couldn't backup the folder because...there was no more hard disk space! Of course!

I had been downloading...er...some files via bittorrent recently. Of course they were taking up a lot of space. Let me take this time to point out something about Wubi. Since Wubi makes a container file in Windows to contain Ubuntu and all it's files, it asks you during the install how much space you want Ubuntu to use. So even though I've got a big hard drive, I told it to use only 15GB. Apparently, I need more space. :P

But this brings to light a problem I've had a few times with Ubuntu. Ubuntu, Windows, Mac, any OS has problems when it runs out of hard disk space. Windows and Mac fail gracefully as you get warned when you're low or out of hard drive space. However, by default Ubuntu doesn't do anything to notify you of low hard disk space. Which is problematic when Ubuntu is writing information to configuration files and can't because there's no more space. I've had all kinds of strange and bizarre problems occur that I would stress about for many minutes, and them somehow have the epiphany that it's due to zero hard disk space left. (In my defense, this time I had a red-herring due to the laptop fall).

Fortunately, Ubuntu 9.04 is bundled with Gnome 2.26, which has a daemon that notifies of low disk space. Hopefully that will save me some headaches and fear-induced adrenaline.