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  • Could not boot to graphical login because of "sudden" eopkg cache disk usage

I don't need any immediate support for this anymore thankfully but I had already started writing something just in case I'd need more help and thought I'd post anyway since its not really "solved". My laptop suddenly froze after the second to last sync and after powering off and rebooting manually I was greeted by a blinking underscore/cursor after unlocking my HDD. After eventually remembering thanks to an unrelated post on the subreddit to try switching to TTY2 with (CTRL+ALT+[FN+]F2) I eventually noticed my disk was full out of nowhere (only ~ 20GB free before hand but that's not full full) and after randomly clearing the eopkg cache (eopkg dc) I had 20GB free and was able to reboot into a regular graphical session.

I wish I had more information to give about this than the fact that it happened and I managed to get things sorted out somewhat accidentally (logs were all aggressively trimmed it looks like and I was sort of panicking and trying random things that could have overwrote the logs) but I think its worth mentioning that this can happen.

It is worth noting for people who may be unaware. When using the software center the package cache will be trimmed periodically. eopkg itself has no automatic trimming so if you stick to using eopkg directly the package cache will need to be deleted manually as described above sudo eopkg dc

Just to be clear, if you sometimes use software center and sometimes eopkg, will the software center trim the package cache for what both have done, or if you use eopkg at all you need to clear it manually?

They have the same package cache, it is just that only the software center trims it automatically.

man eopkg

   delete-cache (dc)

       Clear out any temporary caches still held by `eopkg` for downloads
       and package files. These are automatically cleared when using the
       Software Centre but you must manually invoke `dc` if you only use
       the CLI approach to software management.

Key word is only use the CLI. So if you use both, it'll still get triggered when using the software center.