Re: [PLUG] Running out of disk space?

Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> · Fri, 17 Dec 2021 09:35:40 -0500

On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 07:37:00PM -0500, Christopher Barry via plug wrote:
> Depending on distribution, you'll edit that distro-specific
> configuration file to tell it how many older kernels to keep around.
> For example, for Fedora/RedHat-based distros, I think it is in
> /etc/dnf/dnf.conf or similar.
> 
> Realistically, for most people, just keeping the last good one is
> fine. It's just a fallback in case you hork the one that's set to
> default. Saving only the last one as a backup will likely not fill your
> /boot partition up again as you keep moving along upgrading. Plus, you
> can always boot a live CD or USB image to fix things if something goes
> south.

This seems to be the default in Ubuntu, at least relatively recent
releases. When you install a package with a new kernel you'll be
prompted to run `apt autoremove' to remove the old ones. The manpage
for apt says that

  autoremove is used to remove packages that were automatically
  installed to satisfy dependencies for other packages and are now no
  longer needed as dependencies changed or the package(s)
  needing them were removed in the meantime.

Occasionally there are other packages, but the kernel and related
packages are the ones that come up the most often for me.

I'm sure this must be configurable, but the default is to keep the
current and one prior kernels, and it's worked well enough that I've
never bothered checking to see if it can be changed.

Walt