I just installed Ubuntu MATE 16.04.2 on my Raspberry Pi 3, which is the offered version on the official site. I'm testing it out to see if I can rely on it as a primary home computer. After encountering two annoying issues I have things basically working, but now it's time for regular package upgrades and it seems the /boot partition is too small.
Just today there is a security update that requires something under 50MB of space in /boot, which should be no big deal, but the partition is just barely too small.
ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:~$ df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 122895564 4020112 118859068 4% /
devtmpfs 469532 0 469532 0% /dev
tmpfs 473864 19476 454388 5% /dev/shm
tmpfs 473864 12800 461064 3% /run
tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 473864 0 473864 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1 64456 21320 43136 34% /boot
tmpfs 94776 36 94740 1% /run/user/1000
Below is the complete contents of /boot. Can any of the larger files be safely deleted?
ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:/boot$ ls -la
total 20508
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 16384 jan 1 1970 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 maí 21 05:22 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14010 des 19 2016 bcm2708-rpi-b.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14273 des 19 2016 bcm2708-rpi-b-plus.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13964 des 19 2016 bcm2708-rpi-cm.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15356 des 19 2016 bcm2709-rpi-2-b.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15992 des 19 2016 bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15350 des 19 2016 bcm2710-rpi-cm3.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 17932 des 19 2016 bootcode.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 181 jan 1 1980 cmdline.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36783 feb 11 2017 config.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18693 des 19 2016 COPYING.linux
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2535 des 19 2016 fixup_cd.dat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6622 des 19 2016 fixup.dat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9753 des 19 2016 fixup_db.dat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9753 des 19 2016 fixup_x.dat
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8192 maí 21 05:22 grub
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4231256 des 19 2016 kernel7.img
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4130008 des 19 2016 kernel.img
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1494 des 19 2016 LICENCE.broadcom
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8192 feb 11 2017 overlays
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 634532 des 19 2016 start_cd.elf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4956996 des 19 2016 start_db.elf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2823396 des 19 2016 start.elf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3906116 des 19 2016 start_x.elf
If this is near the minimum /boot partition occupancy, I guess the next thing would be to resize the /boot partition. What is the best procedure for doing this on the Raspberry Pi + Ubuntu MATE platform?
If resizing /boot is impractical, can this procedure be followed safely on this platform to merge /boot into /? Or is there a need to activate experimental USB boot support to solve this problem?
(Naturally I could just try one of these, but it's taken a good bit of time to get to this point; I'd hate to have to start over. It would be a perfectly valid answer to say, "There is no obvious reason why this or that approach should not work.")
