/ out of space - what to do?

[Matthew Saltzman]

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