On 2015-03-20 Kevin McGregor wrote:
I have a Ubuntu 10.04.3 (I know) system with many old kernel images. The problem (maybe) is I've been told the system is out of inodes. I
Oops.
thought I would try to get rid of at least one old kernel image, and this happens:
$ sudo apt-get -y purge linux-image-2.6.32-28-server linux-headers-virtual: Depends: linux-headers-2.6.32-66-server but it is not going to be installed or linux-headers-2.6.32-66-generic-pae but it is not installable
"not installable" may indicate out-of-space/inodes. Or you have some weird combo of dep packages installed for the old kernel (-28) that aren't also in the new (-66). Perhaps the inode problem has screwed things up on earlier updates.
I would start by clearing up several thousand inodes elsewhere on the system. This could be as simple as popping on a usb stick or external drive and mv'ing a bunch of stuff from a home dir or data dir to it temporarily. Once that is done, then fight with apt-get.
Curiously, what does df -i / and df -k / say?
Did you tweak the NBPI / other inode specs at mkfs time on this box? Very weird a non-tweaker user would run out of inodes these days... not like us inode tweakers :-) (Trevor motto: if it's tweakable, tweak it!)