OK, so I should have made sure to get root access (http://wiki.maemo.org/Root_access) before I started installing packages from the development repository. Or I shouldn't have filled up / to 100%. But I have, and so far efforts to find some files that I have the privileges to delete to get a bit of working space so I can uninstall apps haven't worked. Disabling repositories (per http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=43) doesn't work for me as app manager is failing with "can't truncate lock at /var/lib/hildon-application-manager/apt-worker-lock".

Any suggestions on how to more forward short of full reinstall?

In the meantime, I will try and document some of application failures I am seeing and create some bugs so we can improve the experience of users with rootfs at 100%. A lot of things are still working, but a lot aren't....

apt-get clean
works as user. Try that

You only need enough to get app manager running, After that you're golden Another thing, if you manage to get enough space for that. put yourself offline to stop app manager from downloading more icons before you have the chance to disable the repos.

Have you rebooted yet? That can free up some space.

apt-get clean sounded interesting, but it is failing with "could not open lock file /var/cache/apt/archives/lock open (13 Permission denied" followed by "E: Unable to lock the download directory".

This is after rebooting, and even "df -k" is failing. Previous reboots hadn't freed up space, and didn't work this time.

Maybe there should be some way to trigger a script after booting up to check whether the root partition is critically filled up, do those apt-clean work with root permissions and present the user something like:

"You've recently installed : .... We're sorry that you don't meet the space requirements for that. Please chose the software to uninstall".

Oh, sorry. I have moved my apt-cache to MyDocs. That's why it worked for me.

You could check for things you can delete in /tmp and /var/tmp - there's a fairly big calendar journal file in /var/tmp on mine. You'll probably want to kill the Calendar application first though.

I have virtually nothing there. Deleted one file (dbus-info, gave me the willies to delete it), but that didn't get me past the lock file problem in App Manager. I though it might, if all that was needed was a block of disk space for a lock file...

you could try finding some with
ls -laR | grep user

not in / though because that would show all the /home/user files too..

I don't have an N900 just yet, but this may be a good (temporary!) solution.

Can you "wget" and "dpkg -i" the rootsh deb file to MyDocs? If you're able to become root, you might be able to move some files to MyDocs or even "apt-get clean".

If the rootsh deb file is too big, maybe someone here can create a deb file with the postinst line set to "apt-get clean", then the user could just "dpkg -i" it.

Hope this helps, somehow!