The symptoms might vary slightly, but most people will see some or all of these events happen:

• When KDE starts the message Setting up interprocess communication appears for exactly 60 seconds.

• Then the following error dialog appears:

The following installation problem was detected while trying to start KDE:
$HOME directory (/home/user) is out of disk space
KDE is unable to start

• If you click OK the following error dialog appears:

Could not start kmserver, Check your installation

• If you click OK then KDE goes back to the beginning and displays “Setting up interprocess communication” again for 60 seconds. This repeats indefinitely.

If you haven't done so already then switch off the eeepc. Wait until one of the dialogs is displayed then briefly press the power button.

In rare cases this might not work so instead hold the power button and the eeepc should switch off after 5 seconds.

If neither of these causes the eeepc to shutdown (and you should make several attempts to get the eeepc to shutdown of its own accord) then as a last resort unplug the mains adapter and disconnect the battery.

The problem is caused by insufficient free space on the user partition. The solution is to delete some unwanted files from the /home/user directory. All this needs to be done without using the desktop.

In summary:

• If you have any USB devices attached then unplug them.
• Now use the Rescue Console (BusyBox) to delete unwanted files

The remainder of this article describes starting and using the rescue console.

When the eeepc boots it briefly displays along the bottom of the screen the following BIOS message: “Press F2 to run setup. Press TAB to display BIOS POST message”

If the “Press F2 …” message does not appear then switch off the eeepc, disconnect the mains adapter and battery, wait a few seconds, reconnect and try again.

When the “Press F2 …” message disappears you have exactly one second to press the F9 key (the one of the top row of the keyboard above and between the numeric 8 and 9 keys). The common technique is to start lightly tapping F9 as soon as the “Press F2 …” message appears. Tap about 3 times a second and on the fourth tap the eeepc should display the Grub boot menu which looks similar to this:

If you have a line called “Rescue Console” then position the highlight over it and press enter.

If you do not have the Rescue Console then do the following:

1. Position the highlight over “Normal boot”
2. Press the 'e' key to edit the Normal Boot entry (this change is not permanent)
3. Now you'll see a screen showing the Grub entries associated with that boot choice. Scroll down to the one that starts with “kernel /boot/vmlinuz….” and then again press the 'e' key to edit this line.
4. Now you'll be taken to an editor screen that shows you the end of the line you were previously looking at. Add the following to that line: XANDROSBOOTDEBUG=y and then press Enter. You'll be taken back to the screen showing the 3 lines for this boot option.
5. Now press 'b' to boot. You'll be taken to a BusyBox shell, with root permissions. You can now make changes to the file system.

This is an example of the intro message displayed by BusyBox (the numbers may be slightly different, it does not matter:

BusyBox v1.2.1 (2006.12.06-02:01+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

To gain access to the partition on the disk that contains /home/user/ enter the following commands:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt-system
cd /mnt-system/var/tmp

Now look for and delete any files that you no longer want. Some commands the might help you are:

ls            List files in current directory
ls -l         List files in current directory with details
rm file.avi   Delete 'file.avi'

Also check the following directories for unwanted files.

/mnt-system/var/tmp/kdecache-root
/mnt-system/var/tmp/kdecache-user

• Install/run rescue console on the Eee
• Terminals/Consoles explained
• Terminal for beginners