update manager refuses to upgrade kernel to newer version

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 18 Feb 2016 04:21:41 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
>On Thursday 18 February 2016 03:25:47 Spyros Tsiolis wrote:
>> modprobe: FATAL could not load
>> /lib/modules/3.13.0-77-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory
>>
>> Now from what I understand, I also need to create some modules for
>> this specific kernel version. But I am very rusty on such stuff.
>> I've been doing this about a decade ago when I used to re-compile the
>> kernel on the Slackware systems. But with ubuntu now, I've become
>> complecent (and lazy :-) and cannot remember how to do this.
>>
>> Does any have any pointers on this ?

If you need modules that aren't part of the default kernel, use dkms to
build the modules, however, I don't have knowledge about PXE and
actually your issue seems to be a missing modules.dep.

[root at moonstudio ~]# ls -Gg /lib/modules/*/*.dep
-rw-r--r-- 1 360405 Aug 23 09:25 /lib/modules/3.10.61-rt65-1-moonstudio/modules.dep
-rw-r--r-- 1 455027 Feb  1 18:44 /lib/modules/4.2.0-27-lowlatency/modules.dep
 
>This sounds as if you did not do a "make modules install", which
>creates the whole /lib/modules/version modules tree on the drive.

I don't think so:

On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 08:50:48 +0000 (UTC), Spyros Tsiolis wrote:
>mkinitramfs -o ./initrd.img (for the initrd.img file)
>and
>cp /boot/vmlinuz-`uname -r` ./vmlinuz (for the kernel)

Depending on how you build a kernel you need to run "depmod" before you
run "update-initramfs" or "mkinitramfs".

  "[snip] follow this by "depmod" (which will generate a modules.dep and
  map file in /lib/modules/<kernel-version>). After this step you are
  required to manually update your initramfs (or create a new one if
  this is a new kernel) by calling "update-initramfs" or
  "mkinitramfs" [snip]" - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Initramfs

Anyway, using Debian tools there's no need to run either "depmod",
nor "update-initramfs" or "mkinitramfs", if you compile a kernel. The OP
did install a kernel from the repositories, IOW did not build the
kernel.

But, take a look at

http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise-updates/amd64/linux-image-3.13.0-77-generic/filelist

modules.dep isn't part of the package's files, so we can assume that
when installing a package this is generated.

  ls -Gg /lib/modules/*/*.dep

would show if it's available. I suspect it's available and you need to
do something PXE specific when building initrd or you need to correct
something to the thingy, that is used instead of a bootloader.

Regards,
Ralf