Removing Old Kernels

[Tom H]

> Editing menu.lst did not work.
>
> I tried setting howmany=3, and rebooting.
>
> I have both Debian 5 and Ubuntu 8.04 as boot options on this computer,
> and Win XP, and I was not sure which grub (Debian or Ubuntu) was being
> used, so I changed the menu.lst file in both distributions and rebooted.
> I still got multiple kernels displayed for Ubuntu (only one was ever
> displayed for Debian).
>
> The solution was using
> ls /boot/*2.6*
> to find all the kernel versions present, then
> ls /boot/*2.6.x*
> then
> rm /boot/*2.6.x*
> for each x< (current kernel version number - 3)
> of the earlier kenerl versions found
> then
> update-grub
> in both Ubuntu and Debian, and that worked.

Did you leave the "#" in front of the "howmany"?

Your solution is OK in that it rids you of your unwanted kernels and
initrds from /boot but I seem to remember that you were advised
earlier to run "aptitude purge unwanted_kernel" because now the apt
system does not know what you have done or thinks that you have broken
packages and you also have unnecessary /lib/modules/... directories
for the kernels that you have deleted.

Not the end of the world by any stretch of imagination but definitely
unorthodox and inelegant...