FAQ – Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions

• I cannot login anymore.

  The linux homes provided by the RRZE are limited to 2GB for students (10GB for employees). It can happen that you accidentally exceed your quota and therefore cannot do a graphical login anymore. In order to free up disk space, you can try the following suggestions.

  Attention: The following suggestions are meant to free up disk space by deleting „unnecessary“ files, e.g. in the trash directoy. Before executing the following command, you should be sure to understand their consequences and think about if you really want to irreversibly delete the respective files/directories.

  Note: If a graphical login is no longer possible, you can switch to the text console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F3, logging in and perform the following steps in the text console. Afterwards, you can exit the text console with the command exit and change to the graphical login by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7.

  1. Emptying the trash

     You can empty the trash by executing the command
     rm -rI ~/.local/share/Trash
     in the text console. The files/directories in the trash are irreversibly deleted by this!
     Explanation: Deleted files will be moved to the trash in case you want to restore files. However, the storage will not be freed until the trash has been emptied.

  2. Emptying the cache

     You can delete the directory .cache in your home with the command
     rm -rI ~/.cache
     Explanation: Various programs, e.g. webbrowsers, store temporary files in the .cache directory in order to speed up recurring access to data.

  3. Analyze storage usage and possibly delete further files

     You can create an overview of the storage use and find the files/directories with the largest storage consumption by executing
     du -sh ~/{.[!.]*,*} | sort -h
     Explanation: The command creates a list of all files and directories in your home and sorts these ascending by its storage consumption. With the help of this list, you can find out which files take up the most storage and where it’s worth cleaning up.

  If these steps did not help, contact rrze-linux@fau.de for a further analysis of the problem.

• Using commercial software (matlab, mathematica, maple)

  Software like matlab, mathematica and maple has to be loaded by the module system prior to usage to have access to the necessary license.
  Execute the command module load matlab followed by matlab in your console to start up matlab and analogously for mathematica and maple.