up vote 40 down vote favorite
3

When installing a Linux kernel image package, I got, amongst other errors:

No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already

Where can I delete old reports so that Apport can resume doing its bug reporting magic again?

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up vote 23 down vote accepted

The crash files are gathered in /var/crash.

In a session, if apport collects information, there are also apport files in /tmp/apport.appname....

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up vote 10 down vote

When I received this error message, I found it had to do with the /boot partition being filled with many old kernel images and headers that were not removed after dist-upgrades. A temporary solution from this launchpad bug comment is quoted at the bottom of this post.

It's worth noting that Ubuntu is working on a fix through Apt, which as of 2013-03-26 is implemented in Precise, but pending on Quantal.

Warning: removing kernel packages can be dangerous, and might even leave your system unable to boot, so please don't do this if you don't understand what is going on.

I fixed this on my system by removing some old kernels, that I am not using any more.

I checked what kernel I am using like this:

uname -r

This gave me a version number of a kernel I MUST NOT remove because I am using it.

Then I checked what kernels were installed like this:

sudo apt-get remove linux-<TAB>

I.e. I typed "sudo apt-get remove linux-" and pressed the TAB key twice to see a list of possible completions. I chose the linux-image-* and linux-image-extra-* packages that contained versions of the kernel that I was not running, and removed them like this:

sudo apt-get remove linux-image-3.5.0-17-generic linux-image-extra-3.5.0-17-generic linux-image-3.5.0-19-generic linux-image-extra-3.5.0-19-generic

The exact list of packages in the "remove" line might be different for you - I found it out by doing what I describe at the top.

Then I made sure the recently-downloaded kernel packages that failed to configure were ok by running:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Warning: removing kernel packages can be dangerous, and might even leave your system unable to boot, so please don't do this if you don't understand what is going on.

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9  
This is useful but people contemplating using it should remember that it applies only to (some) situations where this error occurs in connection with a problem installing a kernel package. If your problem package doesn't have linux- in its name, then this is almost certainly not the solution for you; if it does, then this very well might help a lot. Also, make sure not to remove all the kernels; if there's no bootable kernel, the OS won't start, and the procedures for reinstalling a kernel in a system that won't start are a bit involved. – Eliah Kagan Mar 26 '13 at 17:06
2  
this was the correct heads-up for me. I removed old kernels and problem was solved. – pwned Jul 21 '13 at 7:19
5  
Rather than removing images explicitly, which could be error prone, you should do sudo apt-get autoremove – edoloughlin Jul 29 '14 at 13:11

protected by David Foerster Oct 16 '17 at 23:33

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