System crash - now shows "no space on device"

[joe at actionline.com]

Thanks Lisa. Deleting some of the /var/log/messages files did free up
enough space that I was able to boot into kde.  But questions remain: why
did the system create about 3-gig of messages? And that only reduced the
root partition from 12-gigs to 9-gigs when there is actually only 3.5-gigs
of valid content in the root partition?


> You can check your free inodes via: # df -i
> or via: # tune2fs -l /dev/sdb1 | grep *Free

df -i shows 770K Inodes available 162K used and 608K available, so that is
not the problem.

tune2fs does not work.

> and delete all the files in;
> /var/spool/mail/root
> /var/log/messages
> /var/log/mail*
> /var/log/mess*

/var/log/messages did have enormous files and /var/log/syslog also has
more enormous files which seem to be identical in size to
/var/log/messages. Why are these duplicated?

> Look for core files

locate core <E> generates a huge list of files that contain 'core' as part
of the file names, but none that I can identify as core dumps. How can I
find only core dumps?

> You can also use yum or apt-get to remove a package to quickly get some
> diskspace free.

I have been able to 'rm' some files (i.e. messages), but what packages
could I safely remove?

> Use locate (find-utils) to identify and remove core files, iso's and
> Virtualbox images. But you can't find or locate without /tmp file space.

> removing the root mail spool (be sure to create it again with
> "touch /var/spool/mail/root | chown root:mail /var/spool/mail/root"

> You can also determine what files were modified 2 days ago:
> touch -t 201209172359 dummy
> find / -name 'DS*' -newer dummy