[xubuntu-users] Update failure / disk full error

[lukshuntim at gmail.com]

On Thursday, July 06, 2017 10:04 AM, Roger wrote:
> I passed on an IBM ThinkPad to a friend after installing Xubuntu 14.04. 
> He loves it. Problem is, updates fail. Looking on the CLI, I saw a 
> disk-full error. Having encountered similar situations in the past, 
> looked and found many old kernel-related files in /boot /src . . .. 
> Deleting them showed >700k files deleted. My friend never would've 
> figured this out. And, Ununtu-tweak choked and aborted.
> 
> 1. Any ideas on how to fix this? End users should not have to face such 
> an obscure problem.
> 
> 2. I personally consider this a bug, and long term. Not sure if it has 
> propagated forward to later versions. Not to forget that ubuntu 14.04 - 
> after, it's an LTS release - is supported thru 2019.

Yes, the safest thing is to *manually* remove them after kernel 
upgrades. For 14.04, there's a purge-old-kernels script in the bikeshed 
package to do that.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/purge-old-kernels.1.html

It was fixed in xenial. I've no personal experience, though, as I don't 
use unattended-upgrades.

Bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unattended-upgrades/+bug/1357093

regards,
-- st