I would recommend this bug be raised to at least High priority. A good friend of mine recently had this problem and we were almost at the point of formatting reinstalling the system, until I happened to remember hearing about this bug on the Ubuntu forums.
To fix this bug, we installed a free ext2/3 driver in Windows XP (the system is dual boot) and moved some files from the Linux partition to the Windows partition in order to free space and allow a graphical login. No system message was given when my friend attempted to login with a full disk. The screen momentarily flickered and then he was returned to the GDM login screen. One solution would be to remove unnecessary files (the package cache, various unimportant log files etc.) if attempting to login under these conditions. A more permanent and possibly easier to implement solution is to simply disallow users to write to the last few megabytes (50 to 100 ?) of the disk in order to completely prevent this problem, and hopefully reduce other issues that could occur from a low disk space situation. -- Unable to login when disk space is exhausted https://launchpad.net/bugs/35217 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
