Bdtyktl

After a recent update, I'm getting an alert saying:

The volume boot has only 0 bytes disk space remaining

But my computer has plenty of HD space free. Does anyone know how I resolve this. (If it's relevant, I'm using the whole disk encryption feature of the alternate install image for Ubuntu 12.04).

To list all kernel:
dpkg --get-selections | grep "linux-image-[[:digit:]].*" | tr "t" ";" | cut -d ";" -f1

The results looks somewhat like this:

linux-image-3.19.0-7-generic 

linux-image-3.18.0-13-generic  

linux-image-3.16.0-23-generic

Don't delete all kernels, only old ones!

Next let's remove the 3.16 kernel,
sudo apt-get purge linux-image-3.16.0-23-generic

and then all unused packages from the system:
sudo apt-get autoclean && sudo apt-get autoremove

The cause was indeed old kernel images.

To clean up all I had to do was run one line:

sudo apt-get autoclean && sudo apt-get autoremove

This automatically recognized old kernals and removed them.

It might be that your /boot partition has accumulated too many kernel versions while doing upgrades over time. This partition is likely to be separate from your large disk partition (mounted as /). You can check the /boot partition space like this (look for the line with /boot):

df -h

There is a nice page on how to remove old kernels.

In short, check your current kernel version, get the list of what is installed, and then apt-get remove the old versions. There is also a "magic" one-liner command on the page that will do all that for you. But use it at your own risk.

Instructions in more detail:

1. 
   

   Get the current kernel version, the one you want to keep:

   
   
   

   uname -r
   
   

   
   


2. 
   

   Get the list of all kernels installed:

   
   
   

   dpkg -l | grep linux-image-
   
   

   
   


3. 
   

   Run apt-get remove on the kernels you want to remove. Not on the latest one! For example:

   
   
   

   sudo apt-get remove linux-image-2.6.32-22-generic
   
   

   
   

More notes:

• 
  

  dpkg -l will tell you the status of the (kernel) package before the package name.
  For example:

  
  
  

  rc  linux-image-3.13.0-39-generic  ...
  
  ii  linux-image-3.13.0-40-generic  ...
  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  • "rc" means that the package is removed and has configuration files. These you do not need to remove any more.
  
  
  • "ii" means that the package is marked for installation and is installed
  
  
  
  

  Based on this, you could list only the kernel packages that are installed:

  
  
  

  dpkg -l | grep "ii.*linux-image-"
  
  

  
  

Alternative solution, using GUI tool Ubuntu Tweak.

Install and go to Computer Janitor, check the System->Old Kernel and System->Unneeded packages, and press Clean.

Use this script so that will remove all other old kernels leaving current version and previous (last 1 kernel version)

KERNELMAGES=`ls -lRt /boot/vmlinuz-*| awk -F/ '{print $3}' | grep -v $(uname -r) | sed 1d | sed -e 's/vmlinuz/linux-image/g'`



KERNELHEADERS=`ls -lRt /boot/vmlinuz-*| awk -F/ '{print $3}' | grep -v $(uname -r) | sed 1d | sed -e 's/vmlinuz/linux-headers/g'`



for PURGEKERNEL in `echo $KERNELMAGES $KERNELHEADERS`; do



apt-get autoremove -y && apt-get purge $PURGEKERNEL -y



done