/ out of space - what to do?

[Anthony J Placilla]

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 21:30 -0500, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Richard E Miles wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 10:12:02 +1000
> > Neil Dugan <fedora at butterflystitches.com.au> wrote:
> >>> Syl,
> >>>
> >>> Sorry I'm late... but there's one point that hasn't been touched here.
> >>> If you just keeping updating, you probably have a large number of
> >>> kernels installed that you don't use or need. Each kernel occupies a
> >>> large space. To get a list of the installed kernels, do
> >>>> rpm -q kernel
> >>>> rpm -q kernel-smp
> >>>
> >>
> >> I am not having troubles for disk space but I tried the above commands.
> >> Both reported 'package x is not installed'.
> 
> Very odd.  Did you spell "kernel" right (all lower-case, e.g.)?  You 
> certainly have at least one kernel RPM installed.
> 
> >>
> >> In my /boot directory I have a large number of files (vmlinuz-?,
> >> system.map-?,config-? and initrd-?).  If I don't want to use a
> >> particular kernal can I just delete the appropiate set of files here?
> 
> That's not a good idea.  The RPM database will think you still have those 
> files, and it may confuse things at some point later.  Better to figure 
> out why you are getting the unexpected error.
> 
> >>
> >> Regards Neil
> >>
> >>> Also, to know which kernel is being currently used, do
> >>>> uname -r
> >>>
> >>> then you can remove the old unused kernels by (as root)
> >>>> rpm -e <<kernel name>>
> >>>
> >>> where <<kernel name>> is the name you get from the 'rpm -q' commands
> >>> above. Just remember to keep one old kernel (other than the one in use
> >>> currently) just as a safeguard.
> >>>[...]
> >
> > I think that you can delete multiple kernels if you put then all in one
> > command, thus:
> > rpm -e kernel.version1 kernel.version2 etc
> 
> Correct.
> 
> -- 
>  		Matthew Saltzman
> 
> Clemson University Math Sciences
> mjs AT clemson DOT edu
> http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
> 


I tend to get a little anal when it comes to RPM'ing off kernels

This should be a tad safer:

uname -r 
to get your currently running kernel

rpm -qa |grep -i kernel
to get the list of installed kernels

rpm -e them off one at a time, taking explicit care not to remove the
one you are running

also take a look at the find string I posted a few days ago in this
thread. You can do an 
rpm -qf 

on any of the big files & figure out if you can do without the rpm that
particular file belongs to.

YMMV


-- 
Tony Placilla, RHCT
anthony_placilla at suth.com
J.O.A.T.

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