Q I am attempting to update the Epiphany browser in Debian 3.1 Sarge, using su && apt-get install epiphany-browser The following is what I get:
Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done epiphany-browser is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used. Setting up kernel-image-2.4.27-3-686 (2.4.27-10sarge3) ... cp: writing '/tmp/mkinitrd.MMwVww/initrd//lib/ libc.so.6': No space left on device cp: writing '/tmp/mkinitrd.MMwVww/initrd//lib/libe2p.so.2': No space left on device run-parts: /usr/share/initrd-tools/scripts/e2fsprogs exited with return code 1 Failed to create initrd image.
Hmm, 'epiphany-browser is already the newest version'? I've seen Epiphany 1.7.6 available for download! Unless this is an example of Debian's infamously glacial update cycle, and Epiphany 1.4.8 is the latest version that's available for Debian distros... And what's this 'no space left on device' message on about? Barely 14% of my hard disk is currently occupied!
A The latest release version of Epiphany is 2.14.3; the latest in the 1.x series is 1.8.5. While Debian has only v1.4.8 in its stable distribution, Debian Testing has v1.8.3 and v2.14.3. See what is available in the various releases at http://packages.debian.org. You need to add testing repositories to your sources list, either by editing /etc/apt/sources.list by hand or by running Synaptic. To do this easily, duplicate the stable entry and change it to Unstable. As for your 'no space...' message, this refers to a file in the /tmp directory. Do you have /tmp on a separate partition? This is a common setup, and a good idea. It prevents a runaway process from filling up your hard disk as it writes to a temporary file. I suspect this is what has happened, resulting in a full /tmp. Run
df -h
in a terminal. If /tmp shops up as a separate filesystem at 100% full, this is what has happened. You can safely delete any file in /tmp that is older than your last reboot.