Problem :
I tried to log in to my machine as regular user with my password. After several attempts, I tried to log in as root with the root password. Tried using both GUI shell and tty. Everything fails.
I looked this up and found that people had these problems because of full disk space for root partition. I know that my root (I have separate root and home partitions) was full because during my last session, NetBeans complained. I also tried rm -rf * in /tmp thinking it had a lot of junk which may be another reason. However, I can’t log in as anything now. So, I have no way to try any solution offered.
If nothing else works, I may try using a live disk to change partition size. Don’t know if that will allow me to log in. However, is there any better solution?
Solution :
You may use a live disk to boot and mount your current root filesystem, and then carefully delete some files in the mounted filesystem.
If /dev/sda1 is your root filesystem, the commands would be
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
cd /mnt