Hacker News Reader

Comment by orp | Hacker News Reader

I am unfortunately forced to disagree.

I recently moved my home machine from Windows to Linux. After a little research, I picked Ubuntu 11.10 (with Unity).

The installation went by pretty smoothly, everything seemed to work out of the box. The only manual configuration I had to do was to teach my Linux box to ping my Windows laptop. So far so good.

Then, 2 weeks later, my disk went out of space.

Turns out Ubuntu has a hidden log file that logs errors, with no sanity checks on size, and it hit 300+ GB.

In addition, flash still isn't smooth in full screen.

Easy to install and use? Reasonably so. Ready for prime time? I think not.

View on HN

Never heard of such "hidden log file" and I've used Ubuntu since version 7. I've also installed 11.10 on a spare machine a few months ago and I didn't encounter anything like that.

That sounds more like you ran in to some random, unfortunate bug more than an indictment of Linux. All systems have bugs like that and yet people don't bail from OS X or Windows as soon as they encounter one.

I've been using Windows for many, many years now. Never encountered anything like it.

In addition, I don't think it's a random bug. Having a standard error file that programs are supposed to write to, without any sort of automatic control by the user or (better) the OS is not 'being ready for prime time'

>Turns out Ubuntu has a hidden log file that logs errors, with no sanity checks on size, and it hit 300+ GB.

Uh, what is this hidden log?

Got to say, been using Ubuntu for 3+ years now, never encountered anything like this.

I have a fairly vanilla install and quickly looking at my /etc/rsyslog.d/*.conf files shows 0 hidden files defined.

Similarly, /etc/logrotate.conf doesn't "hide" any files after rotating.

I'm guessing here but it might be .xsession-errors

I've had it filled up once, because vinagre disagreed with some other library and it kept printing the same error message over and over. After several days it filled up the hdd.

Not saying it's vinagre's fault, just that it might happen and it's a "hidden ." log file

Yup, that one.

I'm not saying it was a hard problem to diagnose - I mean, the file was right there in the home directory.

Figuring out how to turn it off, by the way, was a little more involved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com