Updating the un-updatable

In my post on the relative easy of updating Linux I used Ubuntu's graphical Update Manager to do the work.

Of course, in Linux/Unix you can always do this from the command line. In Debian based systems the relative commands are:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

The first line compares the packages available online with those installed on your machine, and the second line upgrades the packages that aren't current. Easy, huh?

Except that sometimes you get messages like this:

The following packages have been kept back:
  linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic

This is more or less a are you sure you want to do this now? message. You'll note that the kernel is involved here, so you're going to have to reboot the machine once the packages are installed.

All right, I'll reboot, so what do I have to do? Well, it turns out the the packages can be explicitly installed:

sudo apt-get install linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic

This will take care of everything. Just remember to reboot the computer to get the new kernel up and running.