Comment 21 for bug 132311
Revision history for this message
| Barry Warsaw (barry) wrote Re: update-manager should remove more old kernels | #21 |
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(Get the code!)
It seems like people are reporting two problems here. One is boot menu clutter after an upgrade and the other is lack of space in /boot to perform the upgrade.
As for boot menu clutter, a workaround is to remove unused kernels after an update, but I don't think this is actually a good solution. Those old kernels can often be useful when there is a regression. I can't remember how many times having the old kernel around has saved my bacon. For experienced users and those who participate in alpha testing, I think having those kernels around is very important. Those folks won't mind all the extra lines of gibberish. :)
For newbies, I agree that what they problem want is a much friendlier boot screen. About all they will care about is two options: Boot Ubuntu Linux or Boot Windows. I'm not even sure memtest is a useful option for most non-experts. The Boot Ubuntu option should simply pick the latest kernel available. I think this would improve the user experience, but it's ultimately not a bug in update manager. Wouldn't grub be the right place to improve the boot menu experience? If I were redesigning the boot menu, I'd make it all pretty and have just these options:
[X] Boot Ubuntu 10.04
[ ] Boot Windows 7
[ ] Advanced Options
The Advanced Options would lead you to today's boot menu probably. I'd also include a grub configuration option to install the old style (i.e. advanced) boot menu, which will reduce click through for advanced users.
As for running out of disk space in /boot, such that the upgrade cannot be performed, I think the right solution is to include hooks into the CJ dbus service for UM. What UM should probably do is find all the cruft on the system, analyze the package names for outdated kernels, and present some information and an option. Something like this perhaps:
You have some unused software on your system. You can reclaim the disk space now by removing this software, which could prevent update from running out of disk space. [Reclaim Disk Space Now]
That button would run computer-