On Wednesday, 23 August 2017 11:32:27 AM AEST Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
Well if you remove all kernels you are probably going to have a problem. But if you remove all but the most recent then it will probably be ok. Which is it doing?
it's safe to remove all linux-image-* and linux-header-* packages except for the currently running kernel, which may or may not be the latest kernel package installed (depending on whether you've rebooted or not since upgrading it).
apt-get (actually, dpkg IIRC) will warn you if you try to uninstall the currently running kernel. If your running kernel was auto-installed due to a dependancy, mark it as manually installed with 'apt-mark manual linux-image-VERSION', so that it doesn't get removed if you run 'apt-get autoremove'
From a discussion off-list we determined that the OP had apt-get working as desired in that regard, it wanted to remove old kernels and wasn't going to touch the one that was running. This is as expected.
I'm running Debian/Unstable on my laptop and due to some issues of dependencies etc "apt-get autoremove" wants to remove many KDE packages right now which isn't what I want. Also due to conflicts it wants to remove them if I run "apt-get dist-upgrade". This sort of thing sometimes happens in Unstable when libraries are being updated, so I just have to not upgrade my laptop until all the necessary packages are rebuilt to depend on new libraries. It's the sort of thing that happens when you run Unstable. apt-get upgrade is useful in that situation - it only upgrades packages that WON'T require another package to be removed.
Thanks for that tip.
marking packages as held is also useful. I used to use my own script 'dpkg-hold' for this but 'apt-mark' (which didn't exist when i write dpkg-hold) works better.
My latest thing is to build some custom packages for this. I have packages etbe-mon, etbe-kvm, etbe-desktop, and etbe-base. This aren't packages I'm ever going to support (but I may make them available on a private apt repository and people will have the ability to use them if they wish) and definitely not suitable for uploading to Debian. But it makes it handy to suck all dependencies in on install and keep them installed. This isn't for everyone, but it's not THAT hard to do either. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/