Oh crap did I break the computer?/How do I fix it?

Khavall

So here's the situation.

My sister just got herself a shiny new Eee 901, linux version. She wanted it in advanced desktop mode and with the full repositories, so I went to the wiki and followed it exactly. Both of these things I also did on my Eee 900 with 0 problems

Today she wanted to use ftp, so I walked her through using the KDE one. When that didn't work, I suggested FireFTP. Well we found out that was only FF3, and since I prefer 3 anyways, and there was a nice easy script that I made sure to check on my Eee first, as with the Full desktop and adding additional repositories. I used it on mine, brava, FF3 and FireFTP work just fine.

Well she tries to run it and she gets that it can't make the /etc/apt/sources.list because it's out of space. She has a few pictures in "my documents" but that's all. Well then she checks the free/total space in / It shows 100% full, 673mb total. Since my / folder shows 1.5 gigs, that seems wrong.

I spent the last 3 hours online with her trying to figure out what was wrong from forums and wikis and whatnot, but my final answer was that I had no clue, and I couldn't think of a way that what I did would do anything to the computer that would cause this, but maybe the Eeeforums people could help or Asus tech support.


So three questions.

A: Is her computer broken?
B: Did I do something wrong?
C: How do I fix it?

I feel awful right now that she just got this thing and I may have fucked it up something royal. Especially since I don't have the money to buy her a new one for another few months if I did.

Lodbrok

Relax, it is very unlikely that you broke her computer. The 901 has one 4G ssd and one 16 G, but since I installed eeebuntu almost immediately I can not remember how big the initial partitions were. I guess it is possible that the root partition is that small from the factory, but I'll let someone who is familiar with the default distro answer that and also possible solutions if you/she wants to keep running the default distro.

However, like I said, from all the bad things I've read about the default Xandros installation, I decided to install something I was familiar with instead, the Ubuntu derivative eeebuntu. I can not recommend this distro highly enough. There were no problems whatsoever installing it and everything on the 901 works out of the box. You have a full ubuntu desktop, optimized for the small screen of the eeepc (I use the netbook remix version), and of course access to the full ubuntu repositories.

The one thing that might be a stumbling block is the installation if you do not have an external dvd/cd-drive, but it was not really that hard installing from a usb-stick, and there are step-by-step guides to follow.

I would definitively recommend that you/she install eeebuntu (or some other eee-specific distro), I could not be more happy with my 901 after doing this.

eeebuntu-link: http://www.eeebuntu.org/

Edit: You might also want to ask in the eee-thread, or possibly in H/A with a more specific title....

Krikee

Make sure you haven't used all the inodes (df -i) by having a bunch of small files.

Daedalus

You certainly didn't break the computer by through some software-only misadventure: worst case is that you have to use those restore discs (or install a Linux distribution that doesn't suck).

I'm not 100% sure I remember this right, because I installed Ubuntu on my 901 within 24 hours of taking it out of the box, but the way I remember it is that there's two SSDs, the 4GB one and the 16GB one, and the 4GB one is divided into several partitions: one read-only partition for system restore and one small partition for the user to add on programs. You probably filled up that second one, that's all.