I tried to install fdupes this morning on my Ubuntu Linux server but the install bombed out with this error, followed by a string of other warnings before dpkg rolled back everything:
gzip: stdout: No space left on device
What? I’d installed a 500GB drive in that machine recently. It was /boot/. A quick look in there revealed a number of old Linux kernels but luckily there’s an easy way to get rid of them.
This showed me a list of all my installed kernels, and “uname” told me the name of the current kernel which I shouldn’t remove.
dpkg -l linux-image-\* | grep ^ii
Removing them was as easy as this:
apt-get purge linux-image-3.8.0-29-generic linux-image-3.8.0-31-generic linux-image-3.8.0-32-generic linux-image-3.8.0-33-generic linux-image-3.8.0-34-generic linux-image-3.8.0-35-generic linux-image-3.8.0-36-generic
When I finally installed fdupes it kindly removed all the kernel headers saving me a further 505MB of space. I’m pretty sure this is the first time /boot has filled up on me.
fdupes is pretty nice too. It finds duplicate files by comparing file sizes first and then does MD5 checks.
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