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Good and recommended practices

Once you have KernelUpgrader installed, maybe you are wondering what are good practices in order to take advantage of this tool.

How to better use KernelUpgrader

First of all, if you have installed a new kernel from source at least once, you should notice that the compilation time takes so long and do not let you to use your PC normally. So here I will recommend you some tips so you can use this tool and make everything easier.

Running in background easily

We are going to use a tool called screen. This application will let us run everything we want in a background process or in a foreground one. For this purpose:

sudo apt-get install screen
# Create a new screen session with a custom name
screen -dmS linux-kernel
# Go to the created screen
screen -r linux-kernel

Now, at the created screen session:

sudo kernel_upgrader
# This will start the tool - use kernel_upgrader -h to see available options

So, as far as we got, we have done almost the same like the "normal process". So, what is the point?

The possibility to attach and detach whenever we want. For resuming screen, we just write screen -r. Inside the screen, for going back to our terminal and detach it, we press the following buttons combination:

CTRL A D (Ctrl + a + d) - this will make the screen session keep running in background.

Viewing logs/process in real time

As you may have appreciated, the UI of KernelUpgrader is very minimalist: it is only displaying a little information of what it is doing. As said in the program full usage (kernel_upgrader -u), two different logs are being stored while executing:

  • kernel_upgrader.log, which saves basic logging about the progress of the execution.
  • kernel_upgrader.compiler.log, which is constantly saving the compilation output and progress.

So, in order to watch while executing the real progress and logs, we can easily run a simple built-in command that will tell us all the information we need:

# For KernelUpgrader progress
tail -f /var/log/kernel_upgrader.log
# For kernel compilation process
tail -f /var/log/kernel_upgrader.compiler.log

Those commands will display all the new lines that are being written to the file chosen.

For stop displaying the output, just run: CTRL C (Ctrl + C) - will interrupt command execution.

Running in interactive mode

With the latest 1.19 update, an interactive mode was included. Enabling this will allow you to choose which kernel version you would like to install, when possible.

For example, imagine that you currently have kernel 4.9.2. With older versions, such as 1.18.8, you can only upgrade your kernel to the latest version, which is not always recommended. In this situation, you would like to upgrade to the latest stable version of the same version code, which is 4.9.18. Now, running with the interactive mode makes this possible.

You can use it like this:

sudo kernel_upgrader --interactive

After executing it, and checking the available updates, a little prompt will be shown, so you will be able to select which kernel you would like to install:

sudo kernel_upgrader --interactive
0: stable: 4.19.2       | Date: 21/11/2018
1: stable: 4.18.20      | Date: 21/11/2018
2: longterm: 4.9.18     | Date: 21/11/2018
Number of the version to install: 2 # This is the version we want: 4.9.18

If there is no new kernel update available, no options will be shown and a message will appear.