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The things under Debian/Ubuntu used to be:

On Debian or Ubuntu, if you make changes to files like /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf directly, they'll be overwritten.

The configuration files are regenerated by a program called extlinux-update, which runs automatically every time you update your kernel.

The approach has it own pros and cons, however, with extlinux-update gone for goods from Debian/Ubuntu, how would one maintain the extlinux configuration files then?

Here is one I use, based on the linux.cfg file generated by extlinux-update:

label UbuntuMate1804
        menu label UbuntuMate ^Bionic, kernel 4.15.0-20-generic
        menu default
        linux /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-20-generic
        append initrd=/boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-20-generic root=/dev/root ro

All I did is just to change the label and menu label and all the rest has been taken care of for me.

Now, without extlinux-update, does it mean that I need to remember to update my /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf file every time I updated my kernel? Is manual editing the only option? Then how about when the kernel is automatically updated?

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xpt
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1 Answers1

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The kernel packages in Debian have a practice of leaving convenience symlinks to the installed kernel in the locations vmlinuz and vmlinuz.old for current and the preceding one, respectively. Likewise for initrd.img and initrd.img.old. So you can simply reference those paths from extlinux.conf and always access the latest two versions at boot time.

The file /etc/kernel-img.conf can be used to customize this behavior further. For example, if you install extlinux into /boot, then you can have the symlinks into boot by adding the line link_in_boot=yes.

The relevant manual page is linux-update-symlinks(1).

Josip Rodin
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