Re: Out of space error from dpkg, but I can't see where

[Chris Green <cl@isbd.net>]

Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 8:50 AM Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> > Why is /boot a separate partition?  On my other trixie system (not
> > EFI) everything is just one partition.  Both systems were installed
> > 'from scratch' and I just let the installer do default partitioning.
> > Does EFI really need to be so much more complicated?
> 
> In the old days (like 20 years ago), /boot was a separate partition to
> arrange its physical location on the drive.  /boot needed to be near
> the beginning of the drive so grub could load properly, or grub could
> load the kernel properly.  Drive geometry had something to do with it,
> and I believe Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) played a big part of it,
> before linear addressing of large drives was ubiquitous.
> 
> Nowadays, on EFI systems, /boot could be a separate partition because
> the EFI spec says the system partition is fat32.  Some folks make
> /boot fat32, while other folks make /boot/efi fat32.
> 
> My guess is your two Trixie systems have different configurations
> because one is a MBR system, and one is an EFI system.
> 
Yes, that's probably right. As I said I just let the installer provide
a 'standard' installation on both systems and ended up with a
different disk layout on each.

Anyway I created a gparted USB stick this afternoon and used it to
reduce the main (/) partition's size by 1.5Gb and added the resulting
extra space to the /boot partition.  It took a **long** time to move
the 1Tb / partition along a bit (several hours) but it all worked very
smoothly and I now have lots of spare space in /boot.

-- 
Chris Green
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