Removing old kernels that are not actually installed

[Colin Law]

On 26 April 2012 22:32, William Scott Lockwood III <vladinator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 4:21 PM, NoOp <glgxg at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> On 04/26/2012 02:00 AM, Colin Law wrote:
>>> I know how to remove old kernels by finding them in synaptic an
>>> uninstalling them but I have a machine that has been through numerous
>>> upgrades over the years and seems to have ended up with a number of
>>> kernels in /boot that are found by update-grub but according to
>>> synaptic are not installed.  For example:
>>>
>>> ~$ ls /boot/*2.6.27*
>>> /boot/abi-2.6.27-11-generic         /boot/System.map-2.6.27-11-generic
>>> /boot/config-2.6.27-11-generic      /boot/vmcoreinfo-2.6.27-11-generic
>>> /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-11-generic  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic
>>>
>>> Can I just remove all these files?
>>>
>>> Colin
>>>
>>
>> Yes - as long as you are no longer using 2.6.27-*
>
> The proper way to remove them is better of course - use apt-get or
> aptitude to remove the packages that installed them.
>
> Hint: dpkg -l | grep linux

As I can see they are not "installed".  dpkg -l | grep linux shows
only 2.6.35-25 and 2.6.35-22 but in /boot I have various versions of
2.6.27, 2.6.28 and 2.6.31.  I can only guess that for some reason
upgrading has not removed the files over the years.

It seems likely that I can just delete them.

Thanks all for the help.

Colin