On Tue, 27 May 2003, Harry Barnes wrote: > > I figured out that I had to enable those options in the kernel. > > How do I to tell dpkg to uninstall the kernel it installed ? > > I don't want to have two many of those hanging around >
Well, you compile the new kernel using kernel-package, which creates a kernel-image deb package. Then when this new kernel-image deb package is installed with dpkg the last kernel you installed is uninstalled. The files don't get deleted however. The files that are relevant are the whole modules directory in /lib/modules and files in /boot. You'll see in both of these directories either directories (/lib/modules) of kernel files (/boot) from the older kernels you have installed. You can delete these by hand if you want. Be careful though, don't delete the working modules directory or any of the files resulting from the current kernel. These additional files don't do any harm to my knowledge except take up space. So I don't think you need to worry too much about them unless you really need to free up the disk space. Doing things one step at a time is always wise if something breaks, because then you have a pretty good idea what caused the break. Actually, what I have said may not be quite true, depending upon how you have your bootloader set up. There is a commonly done option in lilo to have the kernel that is replaced come up on the boot menu also. kernel-package supports this if the lilo configuration is done this way. This is useful in that it lets you go back to the last (presumeably working) kernel before the install that was just done, in case the latest kernel compile doesn't work for some reason. If you do this, obviously you don't want to remove any of the files or modules associated with this old kernel either.
