When will Ubuntu clean up after updates?

It may be unfair to single-out Ubuntu in this issue, since it may also be an issue with other distributions as well. Regardless, it is 2016 and it seems noteworthy that the annoying "Not enough free disk space" error during regular updates is still a thing.

In the faint chance that there are those who are unaware of this scenario, this is it. The Software Updater application gathers the next round of updates. Upon application, the following error message is encountered.

The error suggests running apt-get clean to resolve the issue.

The error suggests running the clean option against the apt-get command, which seems to be something of a red herring, as it does nothing. Instead, the following will take care of things.

From the command line:

dpkg --get-selections | grep linux-image

This will list all the current kernels that are hogging up the /boot directory.

Run the following to remove unused kernel packages.

sudo apt-get purge UNUSED-KERNEL

There are two things to note:

The UNUSED-KERNEL note will need to be replaced with the actual name of older kernels that should be removed.
Do not remove linux-image-generic.

The full text of the error message is:

The upgrade needs a total of 109 M free space on disk '/boot'. Please free at least an additional 51.6 M of disk space on '/boot'. Empty your trash and remove temporary packages of former installations using 'sudo apt-get clean'

Note that the actual file sizes will vary by system and installation parameters.

The truth of the matter, is that the solution to the problem is not difficult. It is however frustrating that the situation isn't handled automatically during the update process. Little fit-and-finish items like this are the rough edges that Linux distributions still snag users from time-to-time.

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