updates filling hard drive?

[bubblefish]

Will update manager eventually fill up my hard drive? What happens after update manager downloads megabytes of files and installs them?

[FrankT-Qc]

Nah.

Three things happen :

First, the update itself will replace the files on your computer and not just cumullate all the verions. Sometimes, this adds a little space, sometimes, it's actually smaller.

Second : The updating process involves "packages". Your package manager keeps a cache of what you download. This does take a little room, but old packages eventually get flushed. There is also a size limit.
If you look at the file /etc/apt.conf.d/20archive you'll see a parameter called "APT::Archives::MaxSize" you can set that to how big you allow your cache to grow.

Third : There is one exception : The kernel packages (their name usually start with "linux-") don't get flushed so that you can revert to old versions should the new ones not work. Even if these updates don'happen very often, it does, indeed, accumulate over time. If, like me, you have a very small boot partition, you might want, every once in a while, go and uninstall the very old versions.

WARNING : Do not uninstall the kernel you are currently running !!! (I'm pretty sure most package tools are going to warn you if you do so, but still, better safe than sorry). If you want to know what you are running, open a command line and type "uname -a"

have fun !

[mailc]

there is a way to purge old kernels:



Kernel old purge , dry run :
dpkg -l linux-* | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e `uname -r | cut -f1,2 -d"-"` | grep -e [0-9] | xargs sudo apt-get --dry-run remove


Actual remove Old Kernel:
dpkg -l linux-* | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e `uname -r | cut -f1,2 -d"-"` | grep -e [0-9] | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge


Of course one can use the Synaptic for same thing.



Please wait for confirmations from more established users before actually trying it out .

[bubblefish]

Thanks for the lucid, to-the-point replies. Ubuntu 12.04 is a great OS, and the automatic updates seem to be keeping it that way.

[Wim Sturkenboom]

You can also clean the apt-get cache


sudo apt-get clean

On system with smaller hard disks (e.g. netbooks with 8GB SSD), this is advisable.