I also have just run into this problem on an installation of Ubuntu Lucid, owned by a non-technical user.
The machine had become unusable - many programs could not run, including the package manager. Symptoms were totally baffling for the user: although some errors appear claiming that there is not enough space, a check of the filesystem capacity using GUI tools shows there is in fact plenty of space. Indeed, this foxed me for a while, as even when it was evident that the limit was the number of inodes rather than storage space, there seems to be no easy way to find what is using up inodes except by running shell commands which count files, a slow and painful process, especially when directing a user over the phone. The issue: about 20 kernel package upgrades using up all the available inodes on the root filesystem. Uninstalling these freed 55% of a total of 650000 inodes. Entirely simple, and with a bit of polish, could be made totally avoidable with a suitable option. There's no need to keep so many kernel packages around. Removing old kernels does require more effort than it would appear to deserve (list the packages, grep, pipe into apt-get remove). It would make sense to me if the automatic updates manager could be told to handle removing kernels too. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1089195 Title: linux-headers will eat your inodes on LTS. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/1089195/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
