Tuesday, 26 Feb, 2008

Ubuntu Linux aims at being a good OS solution for the desktop. The fact that it aims doesn't necessarily means it is already...I heard 2008 will have more to say about this. Form me, I think it is good enough, and I enjoy using it everyday, yet sometimes I encounter "strange" & "correlated" errors that I haven't experienced in a "more" commercial couterpart combo (XP+Office+Live Search in that case). And that's the great effort were I think Canonical is fully committed to: integration between "bazaar" software. My actual OS is an upgraded Feisty 7.04 -> Gutsy 7.10. I'm not saying everything went perfect the first time, but with some sanity, I tried to keep things working correctly as they were. And at 99% I made it behave just fine (without buying anything). A (bad) reminiscence of Feisty was a little sniffy guardian Beagle (dog).

Beagle is an indexing tool that scans your HD for metadata and indexes it for faster searches (like Google Desktop Search). In Gutsy, Beagle was (reasonably so) replaced by Tracker, another, perhaps more stable, indexing solution. The error that I experienced was due to some beagle remnants that I forgot to remove (while performing the upgrade), so everytime my computer started, this beagle process insanely tracked and Indexed every file inside my PC (maybe even more than once).

So I ended up locked and with no space left (I have a WD 250Gb HD).

My desktop usage is daily emails, browsing (I rarely delete its cache), and data (I always keep my recycle bin full). Ordinary stuff I guess, 'though not so much as to fill a 250Gb HD with stuff (ie. my Home folder is not even 5 GB). This (mad) beagle process, day after day, filled my home folder (and consequently my HDD), with tons of indexed CRAP. What was it, exactly, I simply don't know. Soon I ended up with a full (99.9%) /. I figured that out after the other (open) programs failed to start or complained and popped strange errors.

Evolution's (my email client) error message was stating: "Error while storing folder 'inbox' Summary and folder mismatch even after a sync". WTF??? So I started digging to figure what the problem was.

First thing:

  • rm -r /home/andy/.beagle

...to free up some space. Next, Synaptic and (complete) removal of beagle and beagle-evolution.

Then a fast close & reopen then a Send&Receive - no luck - error message still there 🙁

Some more research, some more infos, so I had to shut all Evolution processes with the below command:

  • evolution --force-shutdown

Next, I went to the ".evolution"-folder (located inside your home folder) and searched for the main Inbox folder.

  • cd .evolution/mail/local

Once there, I found a file called "Inbox.ibex.index".

I renamed "Inbox.ibex.index" to something else, then restarted Evolution.

Everything clean and fixed.

Note: if you (like me), never delete something, unless 100% sure, you can now safely rm the previously renamed file. Back to work, now 😛

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