Debian Ubuntu and Linux Mint Broken Kernel After Date - New Extra Module Naming Convention

I don't consider a lot of these "extra" kernel modules "nice to have" as they often contain drivers for essential items like your soundcard, your NIC and many other devices that may not work. Sometimes you may find that "sound" or "ethernet" worked before a kernel/OS upgrade and now in the new version they don't. Often it will be because you need to install the "extra" kernel modules.

One other weird thing is that sometimes running this "dpkg -l|grep linux-modules-extra-`uname -r`" will show that the extra modules are installed. However, it is often out of date, so you should still run the command below to mindlessly install the extra kernel modules as a first step when troubleshooting "why my sound/NIC/device is not working" and then reboot your system.

Note that newer modern Debian based Linux uses this format: linux-modules-extra-4.15.0-184-generic

To mindlessly just make sure you have all 'extra modules' just run this:

sudo apt install linux-modules-extra-`uname -r`

This is something I've seen some run into. Take an old install of Linux Mint 18.1

ii linux-image-4.4.0-53-generic 4.4.0-53.74 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-image-extra-4.4.0-53-generic 4.4.0-53.74 amd64 Linux kernel extra modules for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP

The highlighted linux-image-extra-4.4.0-53-generic is the old naming convention of how we would make "our extra devices work". Generally it includes extra drivers/kernel modules and for a lot of devices that I use (including often things like display drivers and especially NIC and Wifi cards). So to be in the Debian/Mint/Buntu world these "extra" modules are not really optional.

Now take a look at a new 4.4.0 kernel if we try to use the same "extra" convention to get those modules:

sudo apt-get install linux-image-extra-4.4.0-150-generic Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package linux-image-extra-4.4.0-150-generic E: Couldn't find any package by glob 'linux-image-extra-4.4.0-150-generic' E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'linux-image-extra-4.4.0-150-generic'

It can't find it as we can see above

Let's do a search of all kernel packages for the version 4.4.0-150-generic:

apt-cache search 4.4.0-150 linux-buildinfo-4.4.0-150-generic - Linux kernel buildinfo for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-buildinfo-4.4.0-150-lowlatency - Linux kernel buildinfo for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-cloud-tools-4.4.0-150 - Linux kernel version specific cloud tools for version 4.4.0-150 linux-cloud-tools-4.4.0-150-generic - Linux kernel version specific cloud tools for version 4.4.0-150 linux-cloud-tools-4.4.0-150-lowlatency - Linux kernel version specific cloud tools for version 4.4.0-150 linux-headers-4.4.0-150 - Header files related to Linux kernel version 4.4.0 linux-headers-4.4.0-150-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-headers-4.4.0-150-lowlatency - Linux kernel headers for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-image-4.4.0-150-generic - Signed kernel image generic linux-image-4.4.0-150-lowlatency - Signed kernel image lowlatency linux-image-unsigned-4.4.0-150-generic - Linux kernel image for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-image-unsigned-4.4.0-150-lowlatency - Linux kernel image for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-modules-4.4.0-150-generic - Linux kernel extra modules for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-modules-4.4.0-150-lowlatency - Linux kernel extra modules for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic - Linux kernel extra modules for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP linux-tools-4.4.0-150 - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 4.4.0-150 linux-tools-4.4.0-150-generic - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 4.4.0-150 linux-tools-4.4.0-150-lowlatency - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 4.4.0-150

The naming convention has changed and is now modules-extra "linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic" and this is what we need to install now.

sudo apt-get install linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 737 not upgraded. Need to get 36.6 MB of archives. After this operation, 156 MB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main amd64 linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic amd64 4.4.0-150.176 [36.6 MB] Fetched 36.6 MB in 3s (11.2 MB/s) Selecting previously unselected package linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic. (Reading database ... 252360 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic_4.4.0-150.176_amd64.deb ... Unpacking linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic (4.4.0-150.176) ... Setting up linux-modules-extra-4.4.0-150-generic (4.4.0-150.176) ... Processing triggers for linux-image-4.4.0-150-generic (4.4.0-150.176) ... /etc/kernel/postinst.d/dkms: Error! echo Your kernel headers for kernel 4.4.0-150-generic cannot be found at /lib/modules/4.4.0-150-generic/build or /lib/modules/4.4.0-150-generic/source. Error! echo Your kernel headers for kernel 4.4.0-150-generic cannot be found at /lib/modules/4.4.0-150-generic/build or /lib/modules/4.4.0-150-generic/source. /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools: update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.4.0-150-generic Warning: No support for locale: en_CA.utf8 /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub: Generating grub configuration file ... Warning: Setting GRUB_TIMEOUT to a non-zero value when GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT is set is no longer supported. Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.4.0-150-generic Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.4.0-150-generic Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.4.0-53-generic Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.4.0-53-generic Found memtest86+ image: /memtest86+.elf Found memtest86+ image: /memtest86+.bin done