I’m sorry, I know the topic was treated multiple times before but I couldn’t say if any of the answers proposed actually fitted my situation.
I’m very new to Linux, I started by a dual boot Win10/Mint let’s say 3 weeks ago or so. The day before yesterday I erased windows/windows boot manager. Today I installed Fedora 42 Workspace on dual boot.
At the moment of the USB install, I freed 92 GB to be sure I won’t run on space. It was all fine until after the upgrade manip, a message ‘boot has no space available’ appeared in the notifications.
I didn’t do the Win10/Mint dual boot myself, back then I asked a PC repair person because I had another issue. The only dual boot I’ve did is Mint/Fedora.
Also, after the update, the Grub menu showed waaaay more than it did before, I don’t know why but it struck me because before it had only few (Fedora, 1 Fedora recover, Mint, 1 Mint recover and UEFI). Now it has so much lines that it’s confusing to look at.
I don’t know what to do, could you help me please ?
Also if possible, be as explanatory as possible. I’m a newbie + French, so I may misunderstand quickly if you present me complicated solutions.
Is it a big deal if boot is full ? Does it mean if I shut down my laptop that the next time I won’t be able to enter any session (Mint/Fedora) at all ? Does it mean the laptop won’t even show me grub?
It shouldn’t cause any immediate problem. The main consequence is that you will not be able to upgrade the kernel until more space is made available. You can run the system on an outdated kernel and it will work fine.
It is better to be up-to-date. However, there is a possibility that you could make your system unbootable if you make a mistake while trying to fix the problem. That would be worse.
Yeah, I know all of this. Unfortunately my spare system is too old, it couldn’t make the travel from Fedora 39 to 42. I tried a VM before but here also things went a bit strange while I just followed normal instructions. So it’s quite confusing because when on Mint, I had no issue or when I had, they were easy to understand and fix. Here, it really looks confusing so I’d prefer not touching anything.
Will my problem prevent me to install apps/register files or are the apps/files stored elsewhere?
The problem won’t prevent you installing apps individually. However, it might block full system updates of all the packages. I’m not sure. There is a way to do system updates and tell it to skip trying to update the kernel when you run the update command from the command line. But I don’t know what the GUI Software update utility will do.
With the typical installation, only the kernel (and maybe the boot loader) are stored under /boot.
No problem, thanks already for your answers, I feel relieved to know I won’t lose access to my laptop. Would’ve been a bit sad since I only heard good of Fedora so I wanted to try it a bit
You shouldn’t lose access to anything due to this problem. Just FYI though, if you ever do end up with an unbootable system, you should be able to boot from one of the Fedora Live images and use that to mount your laptop’s drive and access/recover the files.
I can only imagine one scenario where /boot is 100% utilized after a fresh installation and a first update. I think the installer found Mint’s /boot partition and used that to install Fedora kernel and rescue kernel and some other stuff like the grub config.
You don’t want Fedora and Mint to share any boot and root volumes besides the EFI partion, assuming your system already has UEFI and not the old style BIOS.
You need to understand why /boot is so full. I assume you are not accustomed to using a Linux Terminal. Use Gnome Disks to view the partitions (Gnome Disks calls them “Volumes”). When you select the Volume that shows “/boot” in the Contents line it will show you a “Size” line with something like: 1.1 GB — 646 MB free (39.9% full). Yours may be smaller than 1.1 GB or have a much higher “% full”. The use Files to view the contents of /boot by typing /boot in the text box on the top line. Fedora kernel files except the “rescue” files will have fc42.x86_64 near the end. Fedora normally keeps the “rescue” files and files for 3 kernels, but you can tell it to keep only 2 kernels to some extra space. Do you need to dual boot Mint and Fedora?
At some point, Linux troubleshooting needs to use the Terminal. It is much easier to discuss issues in online forums using text. I have long recommended Linux Command for users learning to use a Linux Terminal. A French “community contributed” translation is shown as “in progress”.
Hello,
I don’t mind using the terminal to get explanations but I don’t even know what to type. When I search alone on the internet, the amount of info is quite overwhelming.
I went to disks and could see that my boot is 1.1 GB but it didn’t want to show me more of it, it’s strange.
I need the dual boot for now because I’m very new to fedora meanwhile my setup on mint is very functional. It helps me going to a known environment whenever something is weird on Fedora. For example just now, even if I rebooted my laptop numerous times, updated the system, activated RPM Fusion and the open264 plugin, my firefox on fedora doesn’t load videos on YouTube anymore. While it worked yesterday and it’s neither a firefox nor a YouTube problem, since on my mint all is working and.. it did work on Fedora earlier. I’m very confused. I tried on brave on fedora, and same issue.
Also, I noticed that apparently Time shift saves things in /boot or something like that, so I cleaned it up just to keep the last safeguard. The message didn’t show anymore afterwards, it may be a coincidence.
Add on : it seems boot is 35% full now and as I said, the message doesn’t show since I erased some mint time shifts that I had in stock somehow.
Grub shows a lot of things, if I understand well you mentioned it may be the old kernels. Is there a way to only keep two as you said ?
And yeah, the youtube/video issue is persistent on fedora somehow so I’m coming to mint until I have few hints to resolve it. It’s strange because it functioned before. I reinstalled firefox with flatpak, nothing changed. Went I went to plugins, I ask to always activate open media plugin, it says ‘we’ll install it soon’ but nothing seems to happen. Any advice? That bug is so awkward and arrived suddenly, earlier today I could browse youtube without issue. Rpm is on point, I checked it out.
It sounds like a problem with the installed codecs (codec is an abbreviation of “coder/decoder”). I thought most YouTube videos were available with an open-source encoding though, so I’m not sure. Sometimes I will launch a GUI program like firefox from the command line in order to see if any error messages are being generated while I run the program.
