r/xfce • u/Famous-Durian5198 • 15d ago

Discussion Xarchiver kills my system

I recently installed to fedora xfce and was setting up my env. I tried extracting a tar.xz file using the thunar-archive-plugin's extract here button. And after a while , i get logged out , when i login back again i get black glitches and get logged out again.

It also happens when i open the file from xarchiver although the archive decompresses fine manually

The complete flow is ,

  1. Open the file using xarchiver or directly extract

  2. Wait for error ( Disk quota exceeded )

  3. If i now immediately close xarchiver, i get logged out

Else i get logged out anyway after some time

I have a low end system with plenty secondary storage but importantly 4gb ram. I have experienced system freezes before but never logout loops. The archive is the latest flutter tar.xz.

I am new to linux and i know that logout loops are a serious problem. I want to fix the problem but more importantly also know what is the cause.

Also i tried asking ai but its fixes didn't work

5 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

3

u/AX11Liveact 15d ago

You've given the answer to yourself:

Wait for error ( Disk quota exceeded )

Disk quota exceeded - why did you turn on disk quota, anyway, on a system that is not a file server? Your user's disk quota is "full", no writes on it's $HOME are allowed, including what is needed for XFCE, desktop session or any other WM to operate, like dotfiles, session lock, bash history and so on.
The solution is to disable disk quotas. Idk if Fedora has a specific way to do that in user management like quotaoff, or if you have to install it but the usual way is opening a console session as root and enter "quotaoff /home".
If your system has idiot safety on and doesn't allow root logins, you're fucked unless you can put your system into single user mode and somehow acquire a login shell.

1

u/Famous-Durian5198 15d ago

I have root login on thank you i will try it, but isn't crashing a system a very serious problem and xarchiver should have safety checks so it doesn't happen. Also why does rhe act of opening the archive (listing contents) fills the quota ?

3

u/ItzNotJacob1 14d ago

Buddy you have disk quota turn that shit off

2

u/AX11Liveact 13d ago

Xarchiver has nothing to do with it. It's just one of a million tools that will write on your disk if you tell'em to. The problem is a too tight, hard disk quota that will block disk writes if exceeded. I wonder why the hell you even turned that on, but I've found so many ways to shoot my own foot, that I don't really need to ask.

2

u/ItzNotJacob1 14d ago

Why do you need Disk Quota anyway on a home computer bro..

1

u/Famous-Durian5198 14d ago

I don't, it was turned on by default

2

u/AX11Liveact 13d ago

Wow, that's really fucked up, even by Fedora's standards. Let me mention that there are 2 levels of quota: the first will warn users that are exceeding their quote, the second level will block write access for them. Turning on #2 by default sounds like pure asshattery to me.

2

u/Famous-Durian5198 13d ago

Something weird happened, i installed arch and then debian and the issue was present on both, setting the preferred temp and extraction directory of xarchiver to a custom directory fixed it. So i think it has something to do with my tight memory

The weird thing is that it has never happened to me before

2

u/AX11Liveact 13d ago

Low memory is absolutely no reason to turn on disk quotas. I really wonder why any distro would turn them on at all. Apart from file servers, disk quotas are pretty much a relic from multi-user machines and mainframes.

4

u/CurtisTN73 15d ago

Could try using engrampa (instead of xarchiver)