Broke My Debian System

So it appears my Debian "Wheezy" desktop is broken. Came home last night and my gf attempted to look at FB using the desktop. She mentioned it was being very slow and the Seamonkey browser kept crashing. So I rebooted thinking: flush the memory, things will return to normal. Nope.

Upon rebooting, I noticed a warning message indicating:

root file system has insufficient space

OK. That is a new one. I proceed to finish the boot process and expect Debian to load but nothing happened. So I rebooted into Debian Safe-Mode (which allows for command line maintenance) and entered the df command (disk free). df showed my main partition where all my files are stored is 100% full. Not sure how that happened since I have not downloaded any huge files. I entered du (disk usage) and found my home directory was 29 Gb. (The hard disk is only 37 Gb). Various other directories had 1-4 Gb of data. Very strange because my install of Debian is relatively fresh with a reformatted disk.

So I concluded that I needed to delete some files and the best way to do that would be to load a live CD and poke around the bloated partition. I inserted Precise Puppy (Puppy Linux) into the CD-rom drive and rebooted. Puppy loaded OK but I immediately noticed that only one of the two hard disk partitions were mounted. Upon scanning my hard disk with Gparted, I realized the volume that I need to access uses LUKS full encryption and I cannot mount it to delete some files. Bad news.

Here things got worse. I turned to the Internet for some help. I found a discussion about mounting encrypted volumes from command line at Ask Ubuntu. I found some information that looked promising and entered the following command:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb5 sde5_crypt

The result of which gave me:

device-mapper: reload ioctl failed: No such file or directory

Great!  I don't know what that means.

I did find a very good short blog post on this subject by Alvin Abad,

How to Recover a LUKS Encrypted Disk, but I still end up with the device-mapper ioctl failed error. 

Unfortunately, the PC hardware has got to be around 10 years old and various components are failing (power supply, audio card) so I think it is about time to build a new PC. Too bad because I still  have a lot of work to do tonight.

Uploaded My 1st Website

It took about 4-5 weeks but I finally uploaded my first website! I was much more excited when I was able to connect to the webhost server via FTP and finally upload my files. I had trouble with connecting to 000webhost via the file manager (to upload via the web) and FTP. Late last night I was able to connect with FileZilla and transferred all my website's files. I did put in a trouble ticket with 000webhost and received some feedback but wasn't much help.

My first website - Coding HTML with Free Text Editors for Linux

My website is about Coding HTML with Text Editors for Linux. Go to http://texteditorsforlinux.uphero.com to check it out. It took me awhile to put together the research (I actually used all mentioned editors to put together the site). I wrote about GUI-based editors Geany, gedit, Leafpad, and TEA. I plan to add some WYSIWYG editors such as Kompozer, Seamonkey, and command-line editors such as Vi and Vim later. Anyways, I hope it can be of use to others coding HTML on a Linux-based system.

My current Twitter profile background image

In other news, I am planning a few more websites as well as enrolling in another course (Introduction to CSS3 and HTML5) at ed2go.com. For those interested in learning some new skills online (not-for-credit classes), I would highly recommend ed2go. So far my experience with them has been very good.

The next sites I am planning include a site about Twitter backgrounds. I plan to create a series of generic-themed backgrounds for people to download and use on their own Twitter profiles and possible draw some attention to myself as a graphic designer, maybe make a few duckets here and there ;)