I have been getting update notifications for a few weeks now but whenever I attempt to install them I get this message;

The upgrade needs a total of 74.6 M free space on disk '/boot'. Please free at least an additional 29.8 M of disk space on '/boot'. Empty your trash and remove temporary packages of former installations using 'sudo apt-get clean'.

First of all I don't have permission to access /boot (don't know why as its a standalone machine and i'm the only user).

Secondly, I emptied the trash;

Thirdly, I launched Terminal and entered sudo apt-get clean I was a asked for a sudo password. I entered my system password. Re-entered sudo apt-get clean. The cursor stopped blinking - I assumed it was doing it's "thing".

I let it go for about 10 minutes then exited Terminal. Tried to install the updates but just got the same message.

Is there something i'm ignorant of?

This is the output I get from the command df -h and I have no idea what it all means! @Tim, What's bash and why am I denied access to fstab and /boot?

mike@mike-MS-7800:~$ /etc/fstab
bash: /etc/fstab: Permission denied
mike@mike-MS-7800:~$ df -h
Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root  913G   11G  856G   2% /
none                         4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev                         1.7G  4.0K  1.7G   1% /dev
tmpfs                        335M  1.6M  333M   1% /run
none                         5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
none                         1.7G   14M  1.7G   1% /run/shm
none                         100M   52K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sda2                    237M  182M   43M  81% /boot
/dev/sda1                    487M  3.4M  483M   1% /boot/efi
/dev/sr1                      31M   31M     0 100% /media/mike/Optus Mobile
mike@mike-MS-7800:~$ 

I ran this from the terminal and all is now working.

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge