In message 
          Kiwi User  wrote:

> On Wed, 06 Dec 2017 16:48:22 +0000, Mark J wrote:

>> Now that UbuntuMate resizes the Root partition on installing, I cannot
>> see how to resize /Boot after a fresh install; but with a fresh install
>> any attempt at updating results in being told that there is insufficient
>> room on /Boot. I have resized /Boot, but that involved deleting /Root,
>> and resizing /Boot removes its contents, so back to square one...
>>
>> I obviously must be missing something as to why an install is expected
>> to do what it does, but with me it repeatedly does it, on several 32GB
>> sdcards
>>
> The last time I needed to resize the main Raspbian partition, I used
> cfdisk to set up the partitions I wanted on a new SD card and dd to copy
> partition contents from the old to the new SD card. IIRC this pretty much
> just booted off the new card, but it was a fair time back, when wheezy
> was the default Raspbian version.

> gparted can resize partitions pretty much painlessly.

> I've used CloneZilla (a bootable Linux DVD image with installed
> partition manipulation tools) in the past to do this, though that was
> Fedora on an Intel Core Duo chip. I don't think there is an ARM version.

> You  may also get some ideas from this:

> http://www.libelle-systems.c3487738.myzen.co.uk/free/linux/
> easier_upgrades.html

> I wrote it to describe how I used to do clean installs of Fedora
> upgrades. That was back when Fedora used the yum package manager and had
> no ability to upgrade from one version to the next. Since then Fedora
> replaced yum with dnf and now can do in-situ version upgrades, but I've
> retained the filesystem tweaks because it makes backups a bit easier to
> do.

:-) My area of expertise is far removed from the minutia of modern
computing, and I am a bear of but little brain; but the Raspberry
series was supposed to be for youngsters to learn programming - so I
am surprised that any Distro should be handed out that needed
undocumented partition editing. Hence my assumption that I am doing
something foolish. A rehash is called-for. I have settled upon
UbuntuMate because it is the nearest thing to a straightforward OS
that I have found that is still being updated. For years RISCOS and
Ubuntu have done all that I need, but times move on.

I have downloaded UBmate 16.04.2 and do a sha256sum which it passes. I
had previously decompressed using xz, and dd or ddrescue to write to a
64GB sdcard, but that was prone to errors, so I have recently used xz
to decompress, passing the data over to dd via pipe. Installation
progresses without problems, but updates cannot be done because /Boot
has insufficient space. Autoclean and Autoremove make no difference.
But why? I surely cannot be the only one to stumble at this point. Why
updates, when they cannot be done?

To progress: I am a user, not a programmer, and have had no need to
meddle with partitions; but I have tried to get to grips with gparted,
and have not found it a "painless" as you do. I have been able to
delete the Root partition, and increase the size of /Boot, but must
presume that I have changed the start sector, because its contents
have vanished.

All this should not be necessary...

--
Mark J
From RISCOS 5.23 on a BeagleBoard-xM and Raspberry Pi2B
- and Linux on a PandaBoard ES and Raspberry Pi3B

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