Ubuntu 14.04 apt-get problem...

[Robert Heller]

At Fri, 26 Oct 2018 20:23:49 +0200 "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> hi,
> Am Freitag, den 26.10.2018, 13:38 -0400 schrieb Robert Heller:
> > 
> > apt-get dist-upgrade no longer picks up new kernels automagically --
> > I have to 
> > *manually* update the kernels (apt-get dist-upgrade linux-
> > <mumble>...) and now 
> > I have to manually remove the older kernels (apt-get autoremove no
> > longer 
> > removes the older kernels).  I cannot find where this setting was set
> > so I can 
> > unset it.
> 
> your purging most likely removed the most top level meta package which
> is actually responsible for most of the update behaviour you are
> missing, just install it again:
> 
> sudo apt-get install linux-generic

OK, I did that, and since it did not complain about the package being already 
installed, I guess I did manage to remove it.  This magic of using a meta 
package to handle kernel updates and autoremove is really strange, from the 
perspective of someone used to RHEL/CentOS (which has none of this nonsense).

It would be nicer if the Ubuntu grub2 config was more "sensible". Right now
the "main" menu only ever lists the most recent kernel and to get to an older
kernel, one has to go into a sub-menu ("Advanced"). This is fine (I guess?)
for interactive selection, but is hard to select an older kernel as a
non-interactive boot default. That is, the menu structure is:

current (most recent) kernel
current (most recent) kernel, recovery mode
Advanced Menu
   older kernel
   older kernel, recovery mode
   ...
   
What would be better would be:

current (most recent) kernel
current (most recent) kernel, recovery mode
older kernel #1
older kernel #1, recovery mode
older kernel #2
older kernel #2, recovery mode
...

This makes it easy to change the default from 0 (the newest kernel) to, say, 2 
(the previous kernel) or 4 (two kernels back).

In my case these laptops are used by non-Linux people who just expect to turn 
on the machines and have them just work.

> 
> ciao
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