I have been having many serious system issues over the past few weeks and have been scratching my head as to why. I've now worked out that this problem is having no inodes left on the root partition $ df -i Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/sda6 732960 724565 8395 99% / udev 125179 518 124661 1% /dev tmpfs 127001 464 126537 1% /run none 127001 4 126997 1% /run/lock none 127001 8 126993 1% /run/shm /dev/sda7 5234688 144639 5090049 3% /home What is the cause? I've found that 400K of those are in use in /usr/src $ ls /usr/src linux-headers-3.2.0-25-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-33 linux-headers-3.2.0-25-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-33-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-26 linux-headers-3.2.0-33-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-26-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-35 linux-headers-3.2.0-26-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-35-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-27 linux-headers-3.2.0-35-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-27-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-36 linux-headers-3.2.0-27-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-36-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-29 linux-headers-3.2.0-36-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-29-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-39 linux-headers-3.2.0-29-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-39-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-30 linux-headers-3.2.0-39-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-30-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-40 linux-headers-3.2.0-30-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-40-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-31 linux-headers-3.2.0-40-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-31-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-41 linux-headers-3.2.0-31-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-41-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-32 linux-headers-3.2.0-41-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-32-generic linux-headers-3.2.0-43 linux-headers-3.2.0-32-generic-pae Surely not all of these are actually needed? I've tried apt-get autoremove but it leaves them all be. I don't want to remove them manually, but this is crippling my machine. They also take up almost 2G of the 11G system partition that is getting full (80%) aside from the inode issue. How can I safely remove the headers that are not needed?