Sftware Updater vs. apt-get

Support & Help Requests Raspberry Pi
#1

I am running Ubuntu Mate on a P13. Recently the Software Updater appeared and wanted to install some updates. Total ov 49.4 MB to be downloaded. No big deal. I told it to go ahead. I received the message:

Not enough free disk space

The upgrade needs a total of 48.2 M free space on disk ‘/boot’. Please free at least an additional 4,997 k of disk space on ‘/boot’. You can remove old kernels using ‘sudo apt autoremove’, and you could also set COMPRESS=xz in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf to reduce the size of your initramfs.

I then ran apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. This worked fine:

The following packages will be upgraded:
apt apt-transport-https apt-utils bsdutils libapt-inst2.0 libapt-pkg5.0
libblkid1 libegl1-mesa libfdisk1 libgbm1 libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx
libglapi-mesa libgles1-mesa libgles2-mesa libmount1 libsmartcols1 libuuid1
libwayland-egl1-mesa linux-firmware mount util-linux uuid-runtime
23 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 52.7 MB of archives.
After this operation, 95.2 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

I then called up Software Updater again. Nothing offered to upgrade so I guess my apt-get process got the same packages.

It looks to me like Software Updater is trying to download to /boot. I do NOT see any option to change this in the Settings dialog. Is there some place to change the download location?

TIA,

Ken

#2

Looks like it was trying to do a kernel upgrade.

If you have a default sized /boot partition I’d recommend resizing it to something usable now rather than having to do it when you need it later. I’ve got a 16GB flash drive so gave /boot 1GB. If you’ve got an 8GB drive give /boot something more like 256MB or something, whatever you can spare.

The default /boot partition size is perfect for one kernel. If you ever want to have two kernels (i.e. be able to upgrade an existing one for a new one) then you need more room.

#3

Thanks SFromley,

A nice theory but it does not appear to be the case. After doing the upgrade as described - a couple of days ago - I found Software Updater offering to upgrade my Vivaldi browser. 42Mb download. NO space to be used in /boot for the install. Same error message - need more space in /boot. apt-get upgrade installed the new Vivaldi no problem.

df shows

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p1 63M 22M 42M 35% /boot

so I probably could sneak in a second kernel.

Ken