Hi,

al3xu5 via Dng <dng@???> writes:

> Mon, 08 Jan 2024 11:08:40 +0900 - Olaf Meeuwissen <paddy-hack@???>:
>
> [...]
>> > My sister has a pc desktop and a laptop I installed to her with
>> > Chimaera some time ago.
>> >
>> > Yesterday she asked me to upgrade both these machines, so I did a
>> > dist-upgrade from chimaera to daedalus on both,
>> > [...]
>> > cpio: errore di scrittura: Spazio esaurito sul device
>>
>> Machine translation: writing error: Out of space on the device
>
> Indeed
>
>> > [...]
>> > Some clarifications:
>> > - / and /boot are on the same partition which has several GB of
>> > free space
>>
>> This may not have been true during the upgrade process.
>> Please make sure with
>>
>> df -h / /boot
>>
>> You can ignore any errors about /boot if it's really on the same
>> partition but you should check the Avail column.
>>
>> If needed, you can free up space with
>>
>> apt clean
>>
>> in case /var is on the same partition as /.

Did you try this?

>> If you have say more than 100MB that should be enough.
>
> On both machines there are about 95MB left (/ /boot and /Var are on
> the same partition)

Your original post mentioned several GB, not MB :-/

>> Then try
>>
>> dpkg --configure --pending
>
> [...]
>
> Done... No success...

You really need to make space in the partition that holds /boot.

> [...]
> I did some other investigation and researches, coming to this:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=929424

I checked the uncompressed size of my initrd's and found ~140MB. Adding
the (zstd) compressed size of ~30MB indicates I would need ~170MB just
in order to create an initrd. Your numbers will be different but at
least it gives an idea of what you need.

BTW, you can check the size (in bytes) with

zstdcat /boot/initrd-$version-$arch | wc -c

Adjust for your compression utility and use xzcat or zcat as necessary.
Running `file /boot/initrd-$version-$arch` will cluebat you as to which
utility you need. Might even be bzcat.

> Adding `MODULES=dep` to /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/modules
> solved the problem on the laptop, but *not* on the desktop.

That would normally make your initrd smaller but you still need free
space to hold both the uncompressed and compressed initrds while it is
being created.

> The latter has a lot more packages installed... I presume there is a
> bit less free space on the partition and this could be the reason
> (?)...

Don't presume, check! As said `df -h` will tell you how much you have
under the "Avail" column. For `df -ih` it's under `IFree`.

> Still I cannot understand...

The error message is clear enough. You need to free up space.

> Other ideas?

Remove old kernel versions, perhaps?
Or maybe more drastic, something like

  apt auto-remove    # gets rid of no longer needed dependencies
  apt remove '~o'    # zaps packages not in any of your APT sources

In either case, make sure you don't remove stuff you use.

I just remembered an issue that I encountered on Ubuntu but kernel
images may leave files lingering even after they are removed. You
can reclaim that with

  apt purge '~c'    # zaps left-over configuration

or just run `apt purge $pkg` for those packages in the `apt list '~c'`
output that you want to clean out.
There a bit more info about this here

https://github.com/mvo5/unattended-upgrades/issues/345

If /var is on the same partition, you could remove old log files (under
/var/log).

Temporarily move stuff out of the way to another partition?

Increase partition size and grow the filesystem?

Hope that's enough ideas to get you going ;-P
--
Olaf Meeuwissen