Software Updater errors

[Siliconserf]

This post is here to document a known issue which most likely stems from an odd requirement of the graphical Software Updater tool used in Ubuntu. It's not new, nor is it unique to the pinebook/pine64. It has plagued other SBC communities, even the mighty Raspberry Pi has suffered from it! So, the Software Updater tool runs contently in the background, checking for updates. Or you decide to run it manually... you remember where it is, don't you... it's here:



So, either you run it manually, or it suddenly tells you there are updates ready to install. So you dutifully click the 'Update' button, only to be greeted with this nasty error screen. 



What did you do wrong? Absolutely nothing. For some bizzare reason, it expects that /boot has at least 48.2M free (this may not always be the case, but it is the typical number). And since the boot partition is 50M in size, with 23M used on my own system at the time of writing... the 28M of free space just doesn't satisfy it. 

So what do you do? Instead, run a terminal, for example, Applications -> System Tools -> MATE Terminal, 



and run "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade" (without the quotes). That's it. This will update your system, and you won't get any nasty unnecessary warnings about /boot not having enough free space!

Addendum (Jul 17): Just as a follow up, I tried resizing the /boot partition on a microSD build to 100MB, and had no issues with letting the GUI Software Updater do it's thing. It did not touch /boot during the update, and didn't change anything, so it appears to simply be an unnecessary free space check since kernel updates, etc are not done through it on the pinebook. There is also this report by another user who was able to both use it to do updates, and also upgrade from 16.04 to 17.04, which I would only recommend if you accept that this is NOT supported, as 17.04 is NOT a LTS ubuntu version.

The response to entering the command line is to ask for a password, but the keyboard is ignored. I did this as an adminstrator user. Obviously I'm a nubie, so what magic incantation did I miss?