My wife has a original 4Gb Asus EEEPC. It has an issue periodically where it refuses to connect to our wireless network. It is an EEPC 701 running the original software and operating system. Its symptoms are not being able to do anything especially connect to a ethernet or wireless connection. It comes up with a mysterious message asking you to check if the dcopserver is running (which it usually is: see the Task Manager; View All processes). After googling around a lot, I found the following solution which worked for me and saved any other drastic measures, like re-installing.
Try the following;
Press CTRL – ALT – T to get a terminal up – equivalent to a command prompt on a windows machine. Then type;
df -h
This will show remaining space on your storage cards and internal drive. If it says you have plenty of space left i.e. the space used is well under 100% then try;
df -i
This may come up saying that 100% or close to it of your inodes are in use. This version of the command shows available inodes, inodes are kind of like indexes the filesystem on the EEPC uses to keep track of files stored on the computer in linux see here for more information. On this version of Xandros linux they apparently will get used up as the machine creates lots of temporary files as it is used day to day and instead of these inodes being cleaned up once in a while they are not due to a fault in the setup of this version or distribution of linux.
The following series of commands will fix the problem by mounting the main drive on a second mount point, finding the files which appear to cause the problem and deleting them as it does so. The last command removes the second mount point and so cleans up after itself.
sudo mkdir -pv /tmp/sda2
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /tmp/sda2
sudo find /tmp/sda2 -iname '.wh*' -delete
sudo umount /dev/sda2
After that I did a df -i again and found the filesystem went from 100% inode usage down to 7% on the EEEPC my wife uses. This has happened several times now which is why I am posting it on my blog partly to help me remember how to fix it and also in the hope it will help someone else with the same problem.
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