Endless kernels for rescuing Ubuntu?

Endless appears to add a few drivers that no one (?) else does, meaning certain hardware (like the Dell Inspiron 14 7490 laptops) doesn’t run with vanilla Ubuntu. Creating a hacked install image with an Endless kernel (in place of the Ubuntu kernel) manages to allow installation and also runs fine. However, it doesn’t seem possible to run updates to the kernel, meaning that something is missing from the updated kernels. To clarify, the updated kernels are getting installed fine, they just won’t boot as they are missing the secret sauce (disk driver, allowing the drive to be recognised) that obviously gets installed at OS installation time.

I realise that this is not strictly an Endless OS question but some of us can’t use a full Endless install and I was hoping the FOSS spirit was strong here :slight_smile:.

Does anyone know what might be going on here in terms of modules that are installed at OS installation time but not for updates? The details of setting up the Ubuntu install image are here - https://www.dell.com/community/Linux-General/Inspiron-7490-BIOS-How-to-turn-off-intel-RAID-on-and-swith-disk/td-p/7388147/page/9. Any pointers much appreciated!

Sorry, I have no direct suggestions here. But there isn’t anything special that happens at installation time - in fact Endless installation is more or less just dd’ing an image to a disk - so there is no secret sauce.

As next steps I would look closer at the details of why the updated kernel is not booting (e.g. is there an error message you can research).

It may be initramfs related - you could try to decompress and extract the initramfs from the working kernel and the broken update and compare them for notable differences.

1 Like

Thanks @Daniel. It appears I got my kernels mixed up, sorry for that! I was getting >5.11.0-19 which I thought must have been coming from you but now I realise they were coming from Ubuntu and that our hack to get (only) your kernels is not particularly robust. I am still weak with the apt-foo… but I’ll play around on my own to try and get the kernels updating properly (it should have automatically updated to your dev60 from dev56…). Thanks again for your help.

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.