The last days I had to fight with Ubuntus new kernels and a stingy /boot partition. Since years, I am used to allocate about 150 MBs for that partition, so you have enough space for about 3-4 kernels.

There is no automatic cleanup so you either need to tidy up to make sure you have enough space for further kernels or you expand your partition with a partition manager of your choice. If you don't do that, you probably run into a problem like I did.

Story so far

  • aptitude update came up with a new kernel which I tried to install
  • /boot partition too small
  • aptitude failed with a "No space left on device" kinda error
  • /boot partition manually expanded
  • New kernel via aptitude upgrade installed
  • Error with initramfs-tools

Currently I stuck with this:

$ aptitude upgrade

[...]
    Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/apt-listchanges", line 237, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/apt-listchanges", line 48, in main
    debs = apt_listchanges.read_apt_pipeline(config)
  File "/usr/share/apt-listchanges/apt_listchanges.py", line 83, in read_apt_pipeline
    return map(lambda pkg: filenames[pkg], order)
  File "/usr/share/apt-listchanges/apt_listchanges.py", line 83, in <lambda>
    return map(lambda pkg: filenames[pkg], order)
KeyError: 'initramfs-tools'
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of initramfs-tools:
 initramfs-tools depends on initramfs-tools-bin (<< 0.99ubuntu13.1.1~); however:
  Version of initramfs-tools-bin on system is 0.99ubuntu13.4.
dpkg: error processing initramfs-tools (--configure):
[...]
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
 apparmor

I did a some research on StackOverflow but none of suggested solutions worked out for me. In the end #ubuntu gave me a hint to manually install the downloaded packages via dpkg:

cd /var/cache/apt/archives
dpkg -i initramfs-tools_0.99ubuntu13.4_all.deb
dpkg -i initramfs-tools-bin_0.99ubuntu13.4_amd64.deb
aptitude upgrade

Remove unused kernels

Here is an easy way to remove available (and unused) kernels on your system. Verify your current kernel:

$ uname -r

3.5.0-37-generic

And list the unused ones:

$ dpkg --get-selections|grep 'linux-image*'|awk '{print $1}'|egrep -v "linux-image-$(uname -r)"

linux-image-3.5.0-23-generic
linux-image-3.5.0-27-generic

You can finally purge them with:

$ apt-get purge linux-image-3.5.0-23-generic linux-image-3.5.0-27-generic