Tag: kernel

Remove old Ubuntu kernels

If you update your Ubuntu kernel frequently, eventually you will come to the realization that it is taking a lot of space to keep the old versions around on disk. Another annoyance is that your Grub loader will show a very long list. Sure, you can keep them around forever, should you need to recover them, but for most people it’s safe to remove them. You can manually select and remove the packages in Synaptic, but the easiest way I’ve found is to sun the following script instead. It will remove all old kernel version (except the current one!):

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

Occasionally, you might also want to follow that with the following to clean up other artifacts too…
sudo apt-get autoremove

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Linux kernel updates without reboot

Here’s another great reason to use Linux over Windows.    Ksplice Uptrack provides for runtime patching of the Linux kernel without rebooting of the machine.  This has great advantages where you need to maintain the security of a server but have limited opportunites to reboot due to SLA’s (Service Level Agreements).   Ubuntu Linux was the first supported operating system, other variants are now available too, though often for a fee.