“Not enough free disk space” dialog showed on Software Updater

Question

Whenever I try to update the software using Software Updater, I get this dialog:

which prevents me from getting the upgrade - and going through apt-get upgrade results in partially upgraded sotware. Also, I've done the cleaning suggested in the last sentence. It still shows up.

The only left thing to try is dealing with /boot, but I do not know what can be deleted and what has to be untouched.

Which is the best, "elementary-backed" solution to the problem?

Answer 1

One way to safely free space in the /boot folder that works for every derivative of Ubuntu is the following:

1. Open the Terminal application and type uname -r to get the current version of the kernel used by your system.

2. Get a list of all the installed kernel by typing

dpkg -l linux-{image,headers}-"[0-9]*" | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e uname -r | cut -f1,2 -d"-" | grep -e '[0-9]'

For ones who'd like to know how that works. There's a similar answer on AskUbuntu from which I've taken the information; kudos to Kultom, who linked it in a comment.

3. Once you've checked that your current version of the kernel doesn't appear in the list, merge the previous command with sudo apt-get -y purge to remove all the old kernels. Thus, you will finally have to type

dpkg -l linux-{image,headers}-"[0-9]*" | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e uname -r | cut -f1,2 -d"-" | grep -e '[0-9]' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

It worked well for me and many users gave positive feedback on this procedure. It is not strictly "elementary-backed", but it works.