The /boot partition sometimes needs a bit of attention. If you enable automatic updates, it will fill up with old kernels that you'll probably never need. It also will stop you from running aptitude to install or remove anything. If you find yourself in this situation, you can use dpkg to get around it. dpkg is the higher-level package manager in Debian-based distributions, and it's very useful when aptitude has broken.
To see the status of your partitions, run: df -h:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 3.0G 12K 3.0G 1% /dev
tmpfs 597M 528K 597M 1% /run
/dev/dm-0 97G 14G 78G 15% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /run/shm
none 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user
/dev/sda1 228M 219M 0 100% /boot
If you look in the directory /boot, you will see it full of old kernels and
images. It is not advisable just to delete them, as you can break your system.
Run uname -r, which will tell you what kernel you are currently
on:
3.13.0-137-generic
Let's find out which kernels are installed and which can be purged from your system. To do this, run the following:
dpkg --list "linux-image*" | grep -v $(uname) | grep ii
This will use dpkg to list all Linux kernel images (excluding the one you are
using) that are installed.
The output still might be quite long, so let's refine it by piping the results in
to awk. The awk command below is an instruction to print the second column
from the output:
dpkg --list "linux-image*" | grep -v $(uname -r) |
↪grep ii | awk '{ print $2 }'
This provides a list to work with, and you can stick this in a script or run it from the command line to purge them all.
Caution: make sure the kernel you are using is not in the list. We
should have eliminated that when we specified grep -v $(uname
-r). The -v
tells grep to exclude anything that contains the output of
uname -r.
If you are happy and have sudo privileges, go ahead:
sudo dpkg --purge $(dpkg --list "linux-image*" | grep -v
↪$(uname -r) | grep ii | awk '{ print $2 }')
To finish off, run sudo update-grub2. This will ensure that grub is updated with
the available kernels. Otherwise, you may be heading for trouble. Then fix
aptitude by running sudo apt-get -f install, followed by sudo apt-get
autoremove to clear the images out of aptitude.
Look at your partition, and you will see it has free space:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 3.0G 12K 3.0G 1% /dev
tmpfs 597M 528K 597M 1% /run
/dev/dm-0 97G 13G 79G 14% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /run/shm
None 100M 0 100M 0% /run/use
/dev/sda1 228M 98M 118M 46% /boot
—Adam McPartlan