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I'm having trouble with updating my system.

Update Manager says "The package system is broken" and to try apt-get install -f. In details it complains that:

The following packages have unment dependencies:
linux-header-3.2.0-51-generic:Depends:linux-headers-3.2.0-51 but it is not installed.

apt-get install -f fails with:

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-headers-3.2.0-51_3.2.0-51.77_all.deb
unable to create /usr/src/..../arch/mips/includes..../module.h.dpkg-new whilst .... No space left on device

/usr has 500MB available, and watching df -h during the install shows that it never goes above 91% used, the other mount points are unaffected, so I don't think this is genuinely an out of space issue.

Various combinations of apt-get update, install, clean etc. as recommended in the many other questions on this subject don't seem to work. As far as I can tell, none of the other people with the same problem ever managed to find a fix.

Any ideas?

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  • What is the size of your / partition?
    – edwin
    Aug 3, 2013 at 0:31

2 Answers 2

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Do a df -l and look closely at your total space used per each line.

/dev/sda1         <some number>        <Used Space>    <Available>   <Use %>  <mountpoint>

/dev/sda1 in this particular instance is the disk where my system would be installed and thus where apt-get stores packages. If you have used All available space (Available reads 0) then you will not be able to update. Maybe backup some stuff and delete the contents of your /home/{username}/Downloads for some extra space depending (thats my mostly used directory for excess space/stuff i dont need anymore).

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Adrian,

That is a failed kernel install all right, and if apt-get install -f can't correct your issue due to the limits in diskspace, that's bad. It may be your root or boot or other partition that is at fault here though. There is nothing to tell us the state of the system other than the message provided. What does df -h show? Can you add that here?

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  • I don't think this is disc space, primarily because I can log the output of df -h during the install -f and it doesn't rise too far. Anyway, since you've both asked, df -h shows Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% /dev/sda1 5.7G 4.9G 522M 91% udev 491M 4.0K 491M 1% tmpfs 201M 760K 200M 1%
    – Adrian
    Aug 2, 2013 at 21:19
  • Looks to me like you have no swap space, your disk is 91% full in total and no partitions really defined. Is this some sort of attempt to build a VM of some sort?
    – freecode
    Aug 2, 2013 at 21:56
  • Yes, it's a xubuntu VM that's been running just fine for a while now (probably years). This is pretty much a minimal install, in fact some of the standard stuff has been uninstalled. There's no user data on the local disc apart from a few config files and web bookmarks.
    – Adrian
    Aug 2, 2013 at 22:06
  • Unfortunately, if it is a VM, there is not enough free space for it to perform the updates required. Might consider going back to a snapshot prior to the upgrade and then cleaning up the apt-cache and other items to free up additional space. Other than that, not much other advice to offer for a VM of 6 GB size.
    – freecode
    Aug 3, 2013 at 23:11

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