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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, Ubuntu still keeps running out of space in /boot by filling it w old kernels in the default partition profile. A bug that I've been hitting since about 2011.

In spite of their best efforts, it is not the "grandma friendly" quality software it hoped to be.

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If we're sharing Ubuntu bugs, how about the one where NFS with Kerberos had been completely broken since several years back. You simply can't mount such a share, and you'll always get an authentication error.

I reported it as soon as I upgraded (to 14-something I think) and the bug was marked as severe. Every time a new release of Ubuntu comes out I check if it had been fixed, and of course it hasn't.

FWIW, we've been able to use NFS with sec=krb5 on both 14.04 and 16.04.

My M.O. is:

  # apt-get update
  # aptitude full-upgrade
  # apt-get autoremove

Because as far as I can tell, apt-get sometimes fails to actually update things, whereas aptitude can't autoremove. I'm sure there's a better way.

This is my major gripe with the dpkg ecosystem. There are (AFAICT) multiple different tools to build dpgks and multiple different tools for updating your system, and none of them are adequately documented nor support all use cases.

The Fedora ecosystem is better in this regard. Want to build an rpm? rpmbuild is the only answer. Want to update the system? Use dnf. (Sadly, there's now also PackageKit, and it's not quite isomorphic to dnf.)

AFAIK, the only supported way to build a deb is using dpkg-buildpackage, and all the others just wrap it (unless we're talking about alien, but that's not really "supported" going any direction).

Updating your system is all the same backend, and the Debian-alikes try to tell you to only use one tool for cmdline (apt, now, which just takes the same args as all the various apt-FOO commands did, all of which still work), and one for the GUI (Synaptic, or wrappers around it, unless Ubuntu Software Center has mutated a lot since I last looked).

IIRC they made a big deal about not installing aptitude (a popular alternate text UI for apt-based systems) by default on Ubuntu _because_ they wanted to standardize and fix any deficits, rather than working around them.

> they wanted to standardize and fix any deficits, rather than working around them.

That would work great if would they would take bugs reports seriously. In practice, with Canonical I file a bug and ninety days later get an automated message that the bug was closed due to inactivity.

That's an unfortunate pendulum swing cleaning up from their problem of yester-year - namely, bugs sitting around _forever_ without any comment.

I noticed they changed that policy when I started getting comments on years-old bugs of closed-obsolete. If they're now 90d expiring bugs, I'd _guess_ there's a bit that can be set for your account of whether you're a customer paying for support, and that their support staff have a queue filter that prioritizes those, and the rest get expired if nobody comments.

> apt-get autoremove

You should be doing:

    apt-get autoremove --purge

Otherwise you'll be leaving a lot of clutter around (obsolete configuration files).

apt-get update won't do anything beyond download the latest view of the repository.

you want:

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade && apt-get autoremove

Aptitudes full-upgrade is synonymous with dist-upgrade.

Others wrote "apt-get dist-upgrade" in sibling comments, which should do the trick. If you want to build packages for multiple managers, fpm is a nice front-end for some of them: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

I use FPM all the time, but it is not a 'nice' way to package things, it's an 'easy' way to package things ;)

apt-get dist-upgrade is what you nerd to use to upgrade all packages... Don't blame apt-get for your lack of knowledge on how it works

> apt-get autoremove

This is not going to autoremove kernels unless you modify the default preferences in /etc/apt/. For added benefit you should probably add --purge to your autoremove command.

I lost my encrypted backups thanks to the Ubuntu installer. It turns out that when you set up an encrypted volume, the installer overwrites the LUKS metadata block on all connected volumes. I happened to have my encrypted backup volume connected.

As great as Ubuntu is, I've always thought that a project of their magnitude and their resources (which I grant is not a lot) should focus on QA, specifically with these sorts of issues.

Yep, I had to fix a 14.04 server like that last week. /boot filled with old kernels and apt was falling. I had to manually fix that.

I also don't have swap on my laptop (16 GB RAM and SSD) and I rarely hit 10 GB of used space. With no swap I mean no swap partition. I'm getting those out of memory errors in Opera tabs since the new kernel. Luckily my primary browser (FF) is fine. I guess it's trying to swap Opera out even if there is no swap. I'll reboot with the older kernel and see what happens.

Likely, opera asks for a disk-based anonymous memory mapping - this goes on the swapfile if you have one, and fails if you don't.

The /boot bug is unreal, I just ran into that a few months ago.

It's super frustrating. There's no reason I need twenty kernels on my machine :-p

Ubuntu actually only keeps the current and the previous kernel as necessary and give the user the option to purge all the old kernels. These old kernels will be marked as autoremovable and by setting a flag in unattended upgrades config you can make it autoremove those. On desktops this happens automatically.

On RHEL, it happens on servers, too - anything is better than your /boot partition filling up on its own!

It shouldn't, the default is to keep 6 recent kernel packages.

Honestly, the amount of regressions, packaging problems, hacky fixes, non-stardard configuration and poorly set defaults in Ubuntu is disgusting, look at how bad NetworkManager was / is on it, it's not that bad on Fedora (not that I like it that much) and the whole debarcle with them doing Unitiy on top of Gnome rather than contributing to the community projects, or recently when they released an update that broke all USB 2 ports and if you got that update before they pulled ita and rebooted - you had no keyboard or mouse to work with, their own custom (IMO very gross) init system of Upstart when they could have contributed to System which they're now going to move to anyway, their dodgy partnerships with companies like Amazon where they're putting apps / links on the desktop menus to Amazon (who does very little for the open source community also), it's just a joke and I really wish people would just move on to better distros or at least use pure Debian if they can handle the lack of packages. So often at work when devs complain their DNS isn't working or they can't connect to the VPN or they updated and now their machine doesn't boot - our first questions - 'are you running Ubuntu?' it's like the Windows of the linux world I swear.

So much written, so little sense in that.

Have you actually looked at Ubuntu, have you tried to use it? I'm not even going to go through your assertions one by one to debunk them, as most of them are wrong and unsupported by facts.

Cheers.

he got some details wrong but the frustration is real, especially if you have anything slightly off standard, like a multi monitor setup or, god forbids, a touch screen.

I have a touchscreen. Works great nowadays.

even pressure?

That I wouldn't know. It's not capacitive.

Been using Ubuntu for years in multiple production environments and I agree with him.

Much fewer issues with Red Hat.

andrewshadura is right. Here's just one of your items that is bunkum, for an example.

> their own custom [...] init system of Upstart when they could have contributed to System

upstart was developed several years, just under half a decade, before systemd even existed; it was used by Fedora for three years.

And if Canonical hadn't required contributors to sign a CLA... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7640930

It's true though that Canonical consistently "does their own thing" and then fails to establish it as a standard for whatever reason (technical, political, CLA...). Anyone who adopted the new thing then has to migrate.

Eucalyptus vs OpenStack (ever heard of Eucalyptus?)

Bazaar vs Git (Git won)

LaunchPad vs Github (LaunchPad is alive and well, but Github won the popularity contest)

Wayland vs Mir (Wayland won)

upstart vs systemd (systemd won)

Let's see how these work out:

Juju vs Kubernetes/OpenShift (I'm aware that you can run Kubernetes on Juju, probably won't save them though)

Snap vs Flatpak (vs AppImage?)

It's sad, really. I like Ubuntu and Canonical and strongly believe in competition, but it'd really help if they didn't consistently back the wrong projects.

I guess they need to buy more project managers...

In a lot of those cases (Mir being the obvious exception), the Ubuntu backed solution predated the alternative.

I can't help wonder if this will keep happening as their competition waits to see everything new Canonical chooses to back, then works to thwart it :)

Yeah they invent a new wheel (often poorly) then they fail to test and fix it when it breaks.

I think that Gnome3 has a more detrimental effect on community projects than Unity. Why? Because of the client side controls they are pushing, rendering Gnome apps for everything non-Gnome3 either useless or ugly. And all of that for a few pixels of screen space, something that has been solved more elegantly by putting menus in the top panel.

And talking about breakage: I can't count how many times some important Gnome3 plugin broke after a minor Gnome3 update from the distribution. Or how many times I wasn't able to install a plugin that installed fine just a month ago on the same Gnome3 version. Why? Because you have to download them from some obnoxious website that apparently has no archive and no way to properly match the right plugin version to a given Gnome3 version.

Cinnamon copied the same madness. But you have to install less addons to make it at least usable. KDE is somehow still stuck in the previous decade when it comes to desktop design.

If the Gnome3 project with their questionable design choices and holier-than-thou attitude is the future of desktop Linux, then I have to say that the situation is much worse than it was ten years ago.

BTW, Ubuntu doesn't come with Amazon addons installed anymore. And even when it did, you could entirely remove it and look at the source. I think Canonical realised that they cannot pull something like that anymore.

> rendering Gnome apps for everything non-Gnome3 either useless or ugly.

I use i3 instead of Gnome 3 and the Gnome 3 apps with CSD fit in beautifully. There used to be issues where there were gaps and such, but those are resolved by now.

> something that has been solved more elegantly by putting menus in the top panel

Arguable and probably comes down to personal preferences. For some apps (like the screenshot tool) it fits really well.

a short point of order: Upstart existed and shipped long before Systemd existed, Infact Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 shipped with Upstart. It was the shortcomings in Upstart that led to the development of Systemd. If you're using RHEL 6 you're using Upstart.

My mother, who is literally a grandmother, ran into the /boot old kernel's issue twice already. Very annoying.

I used to use this to clean boot. dpkg -l 'linux-' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/$.$-$[^0-9]\+$/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* $[^ ]$./\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs -p sudo apt-get -y purge

What does it do?

Take off the xargs part of the command and run it to see. :-D

Just looking at it though, it looks like it'll purge kernel packages that are the currently booted one. I don't have a system handy to check though so take that with a grain of salt.

Just for posterity that should have been "are not the currently booted one".

I tried it on Lubuntu 16.04; it required modification:

   # mystery one-liner from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13513171
   # dpkg -l 'linux-' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]\)./\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs -p sudo apt-get -y purge
   # my corrected/improved version:
   noncurrent_kernel_pkgs() { dpkg -l 'linux-*[0-9]*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^ii *\([^ ][^ ]*\)[^ ]*.*/\1/' ; }
   # corrections/(possible-)improvements:
   # - dpkg -l 'linux-' # returns nothing
   # - dpkg -l 'linux-*[0-9]*' # moves 'pkgnm must contain a number' rule (last sed cmd in orig: '/[0-9]/!d') forward
   # - pkgnm isolation/extraction was broken (did dpkg output change?)

output:

  kg@kg-VirtualBox:~$ noncurrent_kernel_pkgs
  linux-headers-4.4.0-43
  linux-headers-4.4.0-43-generic
  linux-headers-4.4.0-45
  linux-headers-4.4.0-45-generic
  linux-headers-4.4.0-53
  linux-headers-4.4.0-53-generic
  linux-headers-4.4.0-57
  linux-headers-4.4.0-57-generic
  linux-image-4.4.0-43-generic
  linux-image-4.4.0-45-generic
  linux-image-4.4.0-53-generic
  linux-image-4.4.0-57-generic
  linux-image-extra-4.4.0-43-generic
  linux-image-extra-4.4.0-45-generic
  linux-image-extra-4.4.0-53-generic
  linux-image-extra-4.4.0-57-generic
  kg@kg-VirtualBox:~$ uname -r
  4.4.0-59-generic
  kg@kg-VirtualBox:~$

Sorry about that, the '*' got removed from a non marked up paste. You are 100% correct. Just a little script to remove all but the current unused kernels that I use on 14.04. Yep, just take the xargs off to see what it will remove (which would always be good advice when pasting a random script LOL ).

I downvoted you for "grandma friendly." My grandma remembers when LaTeX was "new" and was one of the first people to professionally use computer-based typesetting. What exactly does "grandma friendly" look like to her?

I just wanted to say I think it's sad you're getting downvoted. My grandma was also relatively computer literate. If we ever hope to reach equality in our line of work we need to think more carefully about the personas[0] we use, not because our grandmas care but because of how such descriptions affects the people who might one day fall into that user category.

[0] https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas....

I utterly agree that it's patronising to use a generic grandma as an example of a naïve user, and we should stop doing it.

However, I suggest that your grandma's long experience with computers probably means that she in would be especially displeased with the crummy state of the Linux desktop in 2017!

Fair enough.

I just use the term because I'm "family tech support" for multiple grandmas. I'll avoid that phrasing in the future.

Thank you! :)

You can run `apt-get autoremove` and it will purge old kernels/headers for you (amongst any other no-longer-used dependencies).

Oh, I know it's easy to fix, I just single that bug out as "I have done nothing with this box but install updates and surf the web. I am Grandma. It breaks".

If you're Grandma you don't have /boot on a separate partition, you have all / on a big 120GB at least, so if you run out of space you simply know you've run out of space.

Not perfect but not a problem for 90% of people I guess...

Ubuntu installer has separate /boot partition by default. If you don't do anything special during installation you end up with it.

No you don't. Ubuntu's default partition map is one big / and one efi(if necessary).

I literally just did a BIOS install and it has a separate /boot.

I assume it changed recently, I've seen fresh 2014 installs with tiny 255MB boot partitions.

This was ubuntu's recommended/default partition plan. I did not customize it. Now, it's possible this is a plan they no longer recommend and have changed since I first installed Ubuntu, but the point stands:

I installed Ubuntu onto a machine, chose the recommended default options, and it set up a /boot partition that was quite small, and its normal update cycle fills it up and fails to fix the problem automatically or prompt the user with information to fix the problem.

My old mother (born 1936) is using ubuntu since 2013. She can read her mail, answer or forward, view powertpoint, video and pictures, web surf, print stuf, write letters (its her most complex task). I use ssh and x11vnc for remote administration. It is the most simple setup I can imagine.

These are autoremoved nowadays.

> In spite of their best efforts, it is not the "grandma friendly" quality software it hoped to be.

Grandma didn't customise her installation to put /boot in its own, small partition.

FWIW, you can run "apt-get --purge autoremove" to remove old kernels since at least 16.04 and maybe 14.04 (I don't recall). Not fully automatic, but at least it is one command. For fully automatic, you can install and configure unattended-upgrades and configure it to autoremove automatically.

I don't remember when I first installed mine... 12.04 maybe? But this was the default/recommended partition plan.

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