Christoffer Kjølbæk I have a blog, therefore I am…

Cleaning up /boot by removing unused kernels (Ubuntu)

At some point /boot will be full of old kernels (if /boot is a separate partition), which makes it impossible to make a dist-upgrade and it is therefore necessary to remove some old kernels.

Start by finding you current kernel

uname -r

which will give something like

2.6.24-25-server

Now, find all installed kernels

aptitude search linux|grep linux-image | grep "i   "

which will give something like

i linux-image-2.6.24-12-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-14-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-15-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-16-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-17-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-18-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-19-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-21-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-22-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-23-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-24-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-2.6.24-25-server - Linux kernel image for version 2.6.24 on x
i linux-image-server - Linux kernel image on Server Equipment.

Purge all of these, except the one found with uname -r and linux-image-server, which is a meta package

sudo apt-get purge linux-image-2.6.24-14-server linux-image-2.6.24-15-server linux-image-2.6.24-16-server linux-image-2.6.24-17-server linux-image-2.6.24-18-server linux-image-2.6.24-19-server linux-image-2.6.24-21-server linux-image-2.6.24-22-server linux-image-2.6.24-23-server linux-image-2.6.24-24-server

The above freed 250 MB from /boot and 550 MB from / at my system.