[Bug 690911] Re: Installation without formatting fails to remove old kernels

[Otto Kekäläinen]

I regularly install security updates. As I've now been running 12.04 for
over a year, I have now 24 old kernel versions (in series 3.2.x) taking
up to 1,7 gigabytes of disk space.

I did now run the spell
dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

..but I hope Ubuntu would have some built-in mechanism to remove old
kernels, since regular users are not likely to do this kind of
maintenance manually.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/690911

Title:
  Installation without formatting fails to remove old kernels

Status in “ubiquity” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: ubiquity

  When installing without formatting the target partition, the installer
  deletes various system files to avoid conflicts, including /lib,
  however it leaves existing kernels in /boot.  These should also be
  removed since they become broken when their corresponding modules in
  /lib are deleted, and if they are newer than the ones being
  reinstalled ( likely ) they will become the default kernel leaving you
  with an unbootable system.

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