Having trouble with my norns today. Was working fine yesterday but when powering on today I’m not able to select scrips, the main screen says “none”, and buttons are acting strange. K3 is not working when trying to select a script, and I’m also unable to see the full list of installed scripts (I can see them in maiden).
When pressing K2 on main window it says that my disc is full, which seems strange…I’ve checked the disk and I only have a few small audio files stored.
I’ve done restart, reset, sleep a couple of times but no luck
I’m on 221214, stock norns
matron gives me this when pressing k3 on select
lua:
/home/we/norns/lua/core/menu/select.lua:79: attempt to index a nil value (field '?')
stack traceback:
/home/we/norns/lua/core/menu/select.lua:79: in function 'core/menu/select.key'
/home/we/norns/lua/core/menu.lua:147: in function </home/we/norns/lua/core/menu.lua:124>
>>
Disks can be full without a lot of audio, actually and perhaps surprisingly. I’ve had the logs grow out of proportion.
Are you possibly familiar with GNU/Linux/Ubuntu/Unix system administration¹? If someone suggested you “ssh in and df /var/log”, would that mean anything to you?
¹ norns is a huge computer actually; looks may lie
No worries. norns is a little huge computer, and as parts of it’s normal operation it keeps a variety of very useful logs of its operation. Usual laptop/desktop computers do this too. It’s like a little journal or a diary for computer
These standard logs are indeed separate from generating system log file on norns, as you said. Normally these standard logs are completely negligible in size and periodically cleaned up by the system. But some norns scripts or some errors can inflate them. This has happened to my norns – hence that’s my guess.
If this is the case, the solution will be easy.
Let’s check whether or not this is the case in your current situation. Can you please run the following two commands in your Maiden webinterface to norns, and copy-paste the output of both here on the forum?
Perfect. Indeed the disk is full as you said in your original post, and this is due to log pileup as I suspected. You have a 4GB disk which is fine, but logs have grown to 1.2 gigabytes. Normally it’s less than 0.2 GB or something. The normal log cleaning routine hasn’t worked (this was an issue before norns: update 221214. Or perhaps something has caused a lot of log output in the past few days. I’ve seen a crashed jack do this, and some scripts might also do it if left running for a long time.
Please run this command to clean up (“vacuum”) the accumulated logs, and restart norns.
os.execute("sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=100M")
Hopefully then your norns will be able to load scripts as usual. Let me know if that helps
[PS. actually for triage it would be interesting to take a look at those logs and maybe get to a cause, but oh well.]
Hmm. Your disk is no longer full – there is now 150MB of space for things to work. Great! But why doesn’t it? I need to dig my brain if I remember how I recovered from similar situations… althought I am quite sure just freeing up disk (as you did) was enough…
You can always use the os.execute("du -hs directory")to investigate how much space a directory hierarchy takes. du, short for “disk usage”, is a basic unix command to estimate file space usage. Of course this is quite hard to interpret without an idea how much a directory should take.
All the norns stuff lives in the dust/ subdirectory on norns. Code itself takes basically no space at all (imagine grains of sand in Sahara), but I know some scripts come with samples, and some also record audio.
What do os.execute("du -hs dust") and os.execute("du -hs dust/audio") inform you? (wups actually maybe the working directory of maiden is already dust/, so if the two above yields a “no such file” error, the commands would be os.execute("du -hs .") and os.execute("du -hs audio"), respectively.
A 4GB disk isn’t a lot of space to work with given that the operating system and other goodies take a a part of it. I actually have not looked how much the norns image uses. But 4GB should be workable without loads of audio files, as I gather you’ve done so far
Anyone else have experience with norns on a 4GB disk?
take a a part of it. I actually have not looked how much the norns image uses. But 4GB should be workable without loads of audio files, as I gather you’ve done so far