Programs crash if not run as admin

[shmish111]

Ubuntu Hardy Heron:

At the moment, every time I click on tools -> downloads or tools -> add-ons in Firefox, it closes. This also happens with the comic book reader Comix except it just closes as soon as I open it. Finally, if I click on the shutdown button on the Gnome top panel, the panel closes. However, If I run Comix or Firefox using sudo, the problem does not occur.

A month or so ago, I was running Gutsy and all of a sudden everything started closing down until the desktop was eventually just blank, no panels or programs etc. I could do nothing. This started happening more and more so I installed Hardy Heron from scratch. This was fine for a while and then I started getting input/output errors and eventually no programs would work. I had ubuntu installed on a partition of an old hard drive the rest of which was formatted as FAT32. I thought this may be a corruption problem so I re-installed Ubuntu on another hard-drive that was formatted as ext2 and created a new partition.

I have tried swapping out the RAM and checking the CPU temp and they're fine. Surely this must be a hardware problem, but is there any log files that might tell me more like what is happening when Firefox crashes. Where can I go from here?

[tamoneya]

what is the output of:
ls -l ~/.mozilla/firefox
Running as root via the sudo command can cause permissions errors and you probably got some permissions problems. The above command will tell us if that is true. The way a GUI app should be run as root is with gksudo (ubuntu) or kdesudo (kubuntu) like so:
gksudo firefox

[shmish111]

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately it seems that I am a retard... I have only 490Mb of free space on the root partition. I guess the primary user account is allocated only some of this space so it has run out of space. When I run programs as root I suppose I am allocated some extra space. I discovered this by running Open Office and getting some sort of low memory error.

Now the problem is, how can I resize the root partition as I obviously can't unmount it when running the OS. Cant I use the LiveCD?

[tamoneya]

yes the liveCD is how you fix this. Run the liveCD and there is a program called gparted which should be preinstalled. If it isnt it can be installed through synaptic/add remove. Hit alt-F2 and run:
gksudo gparted
Then you will get a graphical interface for making, deleting and resizing partitions.