9 ms·

Yeah, Ubuntu still keeps running out of space in /boot by filling it w old kernels in the default partition profile. A bug that I've been hitting since about 20

• peller 10y ago
  You can run `apt-get autoremove` and it will purge old kernels/headers for you (amongst any other no-longer-used dependencies).
  • Pxtl 10y ago
    Oh, I know it's easy to fix, I just single that bug out as "I have done nothing with this box but install updates and surf the web. I am Grandma. It breaks".
    • nnq 10y ago
      If you're Grandma you don't have /boot on a separate partition, you have all / on a big 120GB at least, so if you run out of space you simply know you've run out of space. Not perfect but not a problem for 90% of people I guess...
      • cakeface 10y ago
        Ubuntu installer has separate /boot partition by default. If you don't do anything special during installation you end up with it.
        • spikengineer 10y ago
          No you don't. Ubuntu's default partition map is one big / and one efi(if necessary).
          • lima 10y ago
            I literally just did a BIOS install and it has a separate /boot.
          • Pxtl 10y ago
            I assume it changed recently, I've seen fresh 2014 installs with tiny 255MB boot partitions.
      • Pxtl 10y ago
        This was ubuntu's recommended/default partition plan. I did not customize it. Now, it's possible this is a plan they no longer recommend and have changed since I first installed Ubuntu, but the point stands: I installed Ubuntu onto a machine, chose the recommended default options, and it set up a /boot partition that was quite small, and its normal update cycle fills it up and fails to fix the problem automatically or prompt the user with information to fix the problem.
• lokedhs 10y ago
  If we're sharing Ubuntu bugs, how about the one where NFS with Kerberos had been completely broken since several years back. You simply can't mount such a share, and you'll always get an authentication error. I reported it as soon as I upgraded (to 14-something I think) and the bug was marked as severe. Every time a new release of Ubuntu comes out I check if it had been fixed, and of course it hasn't.
  • jabl 10y ago
    FWIW, we've been able to use NFS with sec=krb5 on both 14.04 and 16.04.
• amluto 10y ago
  My M.O. is: # apt-get update # aptitude full-upgrade # apt-get autoremove Because as far as I can tell, apt-get sometimes fails to actually update things, whereas aptitude can't autoremove. I'm sure there's a better way. This is my major gripe with the dpkg ecosystem. There are (AFAICT) multiple different tools to build dpgks and multiple different tools for updating your system, and none of them are adequately documented nor support all use cases. The Fedora ecosystem is better in this regard. Want to build an rpm? rpmbuild is the only answer. Want to update the system? Use dnf. (Sadly, there's now also PackageKit, and it's not quite isomorphic to dnf.)
  • rincebrain 10y ago
    AFAIK, the only supported way to build a deb is using dpkg-buildpackage, and all the others just wrap it (unless we're talking about alien, but that's not really "supported" going any direction). Updating your system is all the same backend, and the Debian-alikes try to tell you to only use one tool for cmdline (apt, now, which just takes the same args as all the various apt-FOO commands did, all of which still work), and one for the GUI (Synaptic, or wrappers around it, unless Ubuntu Software Center has mutated a lot since I last looked). IIRC they made a big deal about not installing aptitude (a popular alternate text UI for apt-based systems) by default on Ubuntu _because_ they wanted to standardize and fix any deficits, rather than working around them.
    • dotancohen 10y ago
      > they wanted to standardize and fix any deficits, rather than working around them. That would work great if would they would take bugs reports seriously. In practice, with Canonical I file a bug and ninety days later get an automated message that the bug was closed due to inactivity.
      • rincebrain 10y ago
        That's an unfortunate pendulum swing cleaning up from their problem of yester-year - namely, bugs sitting around _forever_ without any comment. I noticed they changed that policy when I started getting comments on years-old bugs of closed-obsolete. If they're now 90d expiring bugs, I'd _guess_ there's a bit that can be set for your account of whether you're a customer paying for support, and that their support staff have a queue filter that prioritizes those, and the rest get expired if nobody comments.
• quotemstr 10y ago
  I lost my encrypted backups thanks to the Ubuntu installer. It turns out that when you set up an encrypted volume, the installer overwrites the LUKS metadata block on all connected volumes. I happened to have my encrypted backup volume connected.
• SSTitan 10y ago
  The /boot bug is unreal, I just ran into that a few months ago.
  • rce 10y ago
    It's super frustrating. There's no reason I need twenty kernels on my machine :-p
    • spikengineer 10y ago
      Ubuntu actually only keeps the current and the previous kernel as necessary and give the user the option to purge all the old kernels. These old kernels will be marked as autoremovable and by setting a flag in unattended upgrades config you can make it autoremove those. On desktops this happens automatically.
      • lima 10y ago
        On RHEL, it happens on servers, too - anything is better than your /boot partition filling up on its own!
        • mrmondo 10y ago
          It shouldn't, the default is to keep 6 recent kernel packages.
• noobermin 10y ago
  As great as Ubuntu is, I've always thought that a project of their magnitude and their resources (which I grant is not a lot) should focus on QA, specifically with these sorts of issues.
• munin 10y ago
  I downvoted you for "grandma friendly." My grandma remembers when LaTeX was "new" and was one of the first people to professionally use computer-based typesetting. What exactly does "grandma friendly" look like to her?
  • larsnystrom 10y ago
    I just wanted to say I think it's sad you're getting downvoted. My grandma was also relatively computer literate. If we ever hope to reach equality in our line of work we need to think more carefully about the personas[0] we use, not because our grandmas care but because of how such descriptions affects the people who might one day fall into that user category. [0] https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas.html https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas....
  • twic 10y ago
    I utterly agree that it's patronising to use a generic grandma as an example of a naïve user, and we should stop doing it. However, I suggest that your grandma's long experience with computers probably means that she in would be especially displeased with the crummy state of the Linux desktop in 2017!
  • JdeBP 10y ago
    See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667485 .
  • Pxtl 10y ago
    Fair enough. I just use the term because I'm "family tech support" for multiple grandmas. I'll avoid that phrasing in the future.
    • munin 10y ago
      Thank you! :)
• slitaz 10y ago
  These are autoremoved nowadays.
• pmontra 10y ago
  Yep, I had to fix a 14.04 server like that last week. /boot filled with old kernels and apt was falling. I had to manually fix that. I also don't have swap on my laptop (16 GB RAM and SSD) and I rarely hit 10 GB of used space. With no swap I mean no swap partition. I'm getting those out of memory errors in Opera tabs since the new kernel. Luckily my primary browser (FF) is fine. I guess it's trying to swap Opera out even if there is no swap. I'll reboot with the older kernel and see what happens.
  • beagle3 10y ago
    Likely, opera asks for a disk-based anonymous memory mapping - this goes on the swapfile if you have one, and fails if you don't.
• mianos 10y ago
  I used to use this to clean boot. dpkg -l 'linux-' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]\)./\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs -p sudo apt-get -y purge
  • pacifika 10y ago
    What does it do?
    • alyandon 10y ago
      Take off the xargs part of the command and run it to see. :-D Just looking at it though, it looks like it'll purge kernel packages that are the currently booted one. I don't have a system handy to check though so take that with a grain of salt.
      • alyandon 10y ago
        Just for posterity that should have been "are not the currently booted one".
    • cagey 10y ago
      I tried it on Lubuntu 16.04; it required modification: # mystery one-liner from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13513171 # dpkg -l 'linux-' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]\)./\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs -p sudo apt-get -y purge # my corrected/improved version: noncurrent_kernel_pkgs() { dpkg -l 'linux-*[0-9]*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^ii *\([^ ][^ ]*\)[^ ]*.*/\1/' ; } # corrections/(possible-)improvements: # - dpkg -l 'linux-' # returns nothing # - dpkg -l 'linux-*[0-9]*' # moves 'pkgnm must contain a number' rule (last sed cmd in orig: '/[0-9]/!d') forward # - pkgnm isolation/extraction was broken (did dpkg output change?) output: kg@kg-VirtualBox:~$ noncurrent_kernel_pkgs linux-headers-4.4.0-43 linux-headers-4.4.0-43-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-45 linux-headers-4.4.0-45-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-53 linux-headers-4.4.0-53-generic linux-headers-4.4.0-57 linux-headers-4.4.0-57-generic linux-image-4.4.0-43-generic linux-image-4.4.0-45-generic linux-image-4.4.0-53-generic linux-image-4.4.0-57-generic linux-image-extra-4.4.0-43-generic linux-image-extra-4.4.0-45-generic linux-image-extra-4.4.0-53-generic linux-image-extra-4.4.0-57-generic kg@kg-VirtualBox:~$ uname -r 4.4.0-59-generic kg@kg-VirtualBox:~$
• facepalm 10y ago
  My mother, who is literally a grandmother, ran into the /boot old kernel's issue twice already. Very annoying.
• mrmondo 10y ago
  Honestly, the amount of regressions, packaging problems, hacky fixes, non-stardard configuration and poorly set defaults in Ubuntu is disgusting, look at how bad NetworkManager was / is on it, it's not that bad on Fedora (not that I like it that much) and the whole debarcle with them doing Unitiy on top of Gnome rather than contributing to the community projects, or recently when they released an update that broke all USB 2 ports and if you got that update before they pulled ita and rebooted - you had no keyboard or mouse to work with, their own custom (IMO very gross) init system of Upstart when they could have contributed to System which they're now going to move to anyway, their dodgy partnerships with companies like Amazon where they're putting apps / links on the desktop menus to Amazon (who does very little for the open source community also), it's just a joke and I really wish people would just move on to better distros or at least use pure Debian if they can handle the lack of packages. So often at work when devs complain their DNS isn't working or they can't connect to the VPN or they updated and now their machine doesn't boot - our first questions - 'are you running Ubuntu?' it's like the Windows of the linux world I swear.
  • andrewshadura 10y ago
    So much written, so little sense in that. Have you actually looked at Ubuntu, have you tried to use it? I'm not even going to go through your assertions one by one to debunk them, as most of them are wrong and unsupported by facts. Cheers.
    • lima 10y ago
      Been using Ubuntu for years in multiple production environments and I agree with him. Much fewer issues with Red Hat.
    • LoSboccacc 10y ago
      he got some details wrong but the frustration is real, especially if you have anything slightly off standard, like a multi monitor setup or, god forbids, a touch screen.
      • funnyfacts365 10y ago
• webreac 10y ago
  My old mother (born 1936) is using ubuntu since 2013. She can read her mail, answer or forward, view powertpoint, video and pictures, web surf, print stuf, write letters (its her most complex task). I use ssh and x11vnc for remote administration. It is the most simple setup I can imagine.
• rlpb 10y ago
  > In spite of their best efforts, it is not the "grandma friendly" quality software it hoped to be. Grandma didn't customise her installation to put /boot in its own, small partition. FWIW, you can run "apt-get --purge autoremove" to remove old kernels since at least 16.04 and maybe 14.04 (I don't recall). Not fully automatic, but at least it is one command. For fully automatic, you can install and configure unattended-upgrades and configure it to autoremove automatically.
  • Pxtl 10y ago
    I don't remember when I first installed mine... 12.04 maybe? But this was the default/recommended partition plan.