Upgrading kernel on accident, lol. (solved)

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catfood
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Upgrading kernel on accident, lol. (solved)

Unread post by catfood » Wed Jun 17, 2020 5:50 am

So I am fully aware of the number of warnings on here for old distros and dist-upgrade. I brought this on myself, and blame no one.

Running an old Toshiba Netbook (NB505)
I eventually settled on LinuxBBQ Break, it was one of few that had an old enough kernel to work with both wifi and sound cards.
Kernel: 4.2.0-trunk i586 I think, if my notes are right.

I ran several system upgrades over a few years, and was always fine, and little things worked better, so I was pleased.

Last upgrade, I accidental allowed "update to newer kernel" (4.9.3-4 I think), and sound card stopped working now.
Didn't have time to play with it, nor did I wanna make things worse on my own limited knowledge.

Is there anyway to rollback a previous kernel update?
If not, how do I reinstall correctly? I know I was smart enough to do separate /(root) and /home partitions on initial setup(Thank God), but never had to "re"-do this before...

I usually google search and or spam lesser forums for my dumb questions, but I am running BBQ, I want to keep running BBQ, so wanted to talk to the masters and creators so I don't break things worse and I can get back to learning more from you on my testbook dummy which I did actually love when it was going.

Thank you all in advance, Joel
Thank You!
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pidsley
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Re: Upgrading kernel on accident, lol.

Unread post by pidsley » Wed Jun 17, 2020 1:18 pm

I am not currently running a BBQ spin, but for Debian stable, the most recent previous kernel is still available to boot in the grub "Advanced Options" submenu. If this is not the case for your spin, check your /boot directory -- the old kernel may still be there. If it is, you should be able to edit the grub entry to boot the old kernel. Make sure you also boot the previous initrd.

Also check the root ( / ) directory -- there may be a symlink there to the old kernel and you could use that in grub.cfg. I have my grub menu set up with two options: "boot current kernel" (boot the symlink to the current kernel) and "boot old kernel" (boot the symlink to the previous kernel).

If the old kernel is not present in /boot and you have not yet cleared your cache (/var/cache/apt/archives) check and see if the old kernel package is still there. If it is you can use dpkg to install it.

As a last resort you can manually download the kernel package you want from packages.debian.org and again use dpkg to install it.

Once you have the old kernel booting, you can remove the new kernel and mark the kernel as "hold" so it will not be upgraded again, but you will also not get any security updates.

I have not tested any of the dpkg reinstall options, so you may make things worse by following my advice. It's worth what you paid for it (-:

If you google "debian roll back kernel upgrade" you will see a lot of possible options.

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Re: Upgrading kernel on accident, lol.

Unread post by ivanovnegro » Fri Jun 19, 2020 2:55 am

I second everything Pidsley said.

Normally there is no reason to reinstall unless you did an autoremove that was not called for and it removed the kernel and even then as Pidsley so kindly explained dpkg should be your friend.

I only wonder how old the version of this BBQ spin is. :)

/Moved thread to support because it is not actually an upgrade warning. ;)

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Re: Upgrading kernel on accident, lol.

Unread post by wuxmedia » Fri Jun 19, 2020 6:48 pm

yeah ditto, had fun today with a previous senior tech who hated systemd so much he blocked the package, which worked ok on jessie and stretch, but ballsed up buster so much it wanted to drop the apt package.. anyway got it running again with wgetting packages from debian and dpkg -i them
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Re: Upgrading kernel on accident, lol.

Unread post by catfood » Wed Jul 08, 2020 10:54 pm

I apologize for wasting anyone's time. Dumb simple fix I had already learned from you guys here... lol.

My good laptop broke, and stuck using a very old Dell tower. Sound broke on there too after it's Debian kernel updated past 4.4 as well. Troubleshooting it led me back to my old post's on ALSA for newbs, and 2 birds one fix.

Apparently newer Debian kernels just kick the config out of ALSA. Selecting hardware "soundcard name" vs "default", then unmuting every column again, and life works as expected :D

Still always appreciate everyone's help here. Glad to have an ancient Netbook running ancient BBQ back again. Now I gotta figure out where I left off building it.
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Re: Upgrading kernel on accident, lol.

Unread post by catfood » Wed Jul 08, 2020 10:59 pm

wuxmedia wrote:
Fri Jun 19, 2020 6:48 pm
yeah ditto, had fun today with a previous senior tech who hated systemd so much he blocked the package, which worked ok on jessie and stretch, but ballsed up buster so much it wanted to drop the apt package.. anyway got it running again with wgetting packages from debian and dpkg -i them
I barely learned what systemd is just this week, but I'm also starting to hate what little I have learned about it. All my hardware is 95-05, so trying to find the balance between updates breaking things, and keeping my computers even remotely secure. Good to know not to mess with Buster on these til Stretch hits EoL on updates. Thanks.
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Re: Upgrading kernel on accident, lol.

Unread post by catfood » Wed Jul 08, 2020 11:09 pm

ivanovnegro wrote:
Fri Jun 19, 2020 2:55 am
I second everything Pidsley said.

Normally there is no reason to reinstall unless you did an autoremove that was not called for and it removed the kernel and even then as Pidsley so kindly explained dpkg should be your friend.

I only wonder how old the version of this BBQ spin is. :)

/Moved thread to support because it is not actually an upgrade warning. ;)
Thank you in hindsight. I have to unlearn a very bad habit of hitting apt-get autoremove right after upgrades! I saw GRUB booting from previous kernels in a lot of threads online, but I'd already wiped previous ones not knowing any better.

I'm running BBQ Break from 2016, with 2wm( fully unsupported and gone from suckless now :D ), and appearance mods to make closer to bluets. Ironically not breaking much and ran better and better with most previous kernel updates. 4.2.0-trunk-586 was the only kernel that didn't ignore some piece of hardware or another.

Let's hope my wi-fi card still works after recent kernel update. Fingers crossed.
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Re: Upgrading kernel on accident, lol.

Unread post by ivanovnegro » Thu Jul 09, 2020 11:53 am

^ BBQ Break. Wow. At least you enjoy it.

As for autoremove. I use it all the time on sid but I always read the output before performing it. I am OCD. Never had a problem with it but I know the Siduction guys e.g. discourage its use, IIRC. The problem is usually with meta packages but as I build everything from scratch without recommends there is no problem.

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Re: Upgrading kernel on accident, lol. (solved)

Unread post by catfood » Sat Jul 11, 2020 4:43 am

I tried some manual program removes, but it seems to crash RM if I do more than like 3 at a time. Terminal takes one line with remove, then prints the rest of the list in new command lines, and gets lost trying to open 4 programs at once for each line, lol. With a 2pg list, I gave up on that for now.

So as of today, I'm more confused on what I thought I was understanding.
kernels 4.2 and 4.4 seemed to be my go-tos for not screwing up any hardware function. I assumed had to stay old, so I kept relevant kernel modules for older hardware.

Kernels in the 4.9 range broke sound regardless of resetting ALSA and or Pulseaudio settings.

Currently using a livecd on tower to safely dig through old sketchy torrent hard drives.
Running kernel 5.4.0-26 generic somehow is not breaking any hardware functions?

Do certain kernel versions just skip certain drivers for a while?
Can, for example Realtek audio kernel modules be manually put into every kernel in existance through apt-get, or do some kernel generations just choose not to make them?

I'm starting to understand with gentoo research, that I can pretty much stick whatever modules I want in at anytime, but until I learn enough to be comfortable making specific kernels for specific hardware, I'd like to understand why pre-packaged modules seem to be the bane of my existence running debian...
Thank You!
(I remember when debian "non-gui" installer scared me. #never-forget)

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