Yesterday I casually restarted my Thinkpad X380 just to boot to a black screen with a blinking cursor. Trying to get into TTY was a bit… “funny” pressing CTRL+ALT+Fx was showing a login screen for a split second and then returning to the black screen with the blinking cursor. No keyboard input was taken into this split second.
Fx*#! I was prepare to chroot and to attempt and update, or to replace some packages or to see if by mistake I have any nvidia drivers installed (google was pointing in that direction).
I do not know why I thought to check a ncdu and a gparted only to discover that my / is full… with… pacman cache…
needless to say that deleting the contents of the cache folder solved the problem. Now I only need to investigate why this was not automatically emptied…
paccache is the CLI command for managing the size of pacman package cache.
And you can automate this with a systemd service using a command paccache-service-manager or some similar tool.
Although the solution is simple, I do not understand why this service is not activated in the first place. I ran into the same problem - something that is so likely to render the system unusable (for searching, you’d need another running OS/PC) disqualifies Endeavour-OS as daily driver for the average user without rather good linux knowledge…
It is activated in the first place. I believe the default is to keep 3 package versions and to prune more than that on a weekly basis.
If you want to prune more aggressively you can either change the settings in /usr/lib/systemd/system/paccache.timer, or you can do it right in the handy GUI tool that is built in to the EOS welcome app.
