@pabouk Hi. Thanks so much for the help! In fact I wasn't able to use apt-get remove, because it tried to do apt- get update first, which failed because of the inode exhaustion.
I wasn't comfortable removing anything manually because I didn't know which files were safe to remove. All but one of the surplus packages in /usr/src were for a linux headers higher than my current linux version, so for all I know the system might depend on them in some way when it tries to upgrade itself from the current version. I erased the one, older package, but this did not free enough inodes to allow any operations to complete. All of the linux headers were piling up in /usr/src. In the end I resolved the process by doing the following: 1. attaching a much larger new volume, formating it, and mounting it on /mnt 2. cp -a /usr/src/* /mnt # to copy all the linux headers onto the other volume 3. rm -rf /usr/src/* # to remove them from the root volume 3. unmount the new volume mounted at /mnt 4. remount the volume at /usr/src By this sequence of operations, I exactly preserved the structure of files and folders on the filesystem, while changing how the inode usage was distributed over partitions. So that relieved the inode exhaustion. Then I was able to use apt-get update, and apt-get autoremove, etc.. to completed the pending upgrades and remove the unused packages. My big takeaway from this is that I was naive to think unattended- upgrades could run for years unattended, like a router. -- 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
