Hi Andrew and Johannes, My reply of a few hours ago had the wrong subject! Sorry for the mix up.
No Andrew, /var is not full: there is still 2.4GB free out of 2.9GB. I have pasted the complete output from aptitude below. Johannes, when I log in as root via tty1 and run aptitude I get the output pasted below. Here is the output copied from aptitude" redcube:/home/robin# aptitude upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Reading task descriptions... Done Building tag database... Done The following packages will be upgraded: linux-image-2.6.18-5-amd64 1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B/16.8MB of archives. After unpacking 8192B will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Y Preconfiguring packages ... (Reading database ... 180396 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace linux-image-2.6.18-5-amd64 2.6.18.dfsg.1-13etch3 (using ... /linux-image-2.6.18-5-amd64_2.6.18.dfsg.1-13etch4_amd64.deb) ... The directory /lib/modules/2.6.18-5-amd64 still exists. Continuing as directed. Done. Unpacking replacement linux-image-2.6.18-5-amd64 ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/linux- image-2.6.18-5-amd64_2.6.18 .dfsg.1-13etch4_amd64.deb (--unpack): failed in buffer_write(fd) (9, ret=-1): backend dpkg-deb during `./lib/modules/ 2.6.18-5-amd64/kernel/sound/pci/emu10k1/snd- emu10k1.ko': No space left on device dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe) Running postrm hook script /sbin/update-grub. You shouldn't call /sbin/update-grub. Please call /usr/sbin/update-grub instead! Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub Searching for default file ... found: /boot/grub/default Testing for an existing GRUB menu.lst file ... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst Searching for splash image ... none found, skipping ... Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.18-5-amd64 Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-amd64 Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... done Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/linux- image-2.6.18-5-amd64_2.6.18.dfsg.1-13etch4_amd64. deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) A package failed to install. Trying to recover: redcube:/home/robin# Richard
