I got the following error messages while updating Debian Testing this morning:
E: initramfs-tools: installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
gzip: stdout: No space left on device
E: mkinitramfs failure gzip 1
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-5.14.0-4-amd64 with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
initramfs-tools
Say What? This is a 500G HD and it's only 7% full!
Turns out /boot is on its own 500MB partition and its full.
I had too many old kernels installed, and the solution was to get rid of most of them (keeping one known good backup kernel).
I searched for "linux-image" in Synaptic, but this can be done from a command line too obviously.
When I had finished I ran
# update-initramfs -u
Which is the part of the update precess that had failed.
I will have to pay more attention to housekeeping from now on.
