15

I have a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 and ubuntu 20.04 installed. Various things wouldn't work initially: The screen wouldn't turn back on when resuming from sleep, the screen brightness fn-keys wouldn't work properly, I wasn't able to switch to wayland (I swear, there was no gear icon in the login screen). Possibly more, but that is what bothered me.

I was able to resolve all these issues by installing the 5.8 kernel line. Because I did this by manually downloading and installing .deb packages, I now have a few problems:

  • apt thinks it's appropriate to install the 5.4 kernel again once that package (linux-headers-...) receives updates.
  • To receive 5.8 kernel updates, I have to manually download and install the latest .deb packages.

All the sites that pop up when searching for "ubuntu 20.04 kernel 5.8 {ppa,updates}" only present manual solutions, be it via wget-ing .deb's, using a script, or using some other GUI application.

What I'm used to from ubuntu, would be to add a ppa to my /etc/apt/sources.list and after doing $ apt install linux-headers-5.8.x-x once, I would continue to receive updates by doing $ apt update && apt upgrade.

Is there such a ppa?

ammut
  • 374
  • @guiverc Enabling proposed is not a good idea and may have a lot of side effects ;-) – Pilot6 Nov 12 '20 at 09:25
  • Yes thanks @Pilot6, it would cause a lot more updated packages to be installed, had someone 'leapt' on what I just said without thinking about it; my pointing to your answer was I felt cover enough, but maybe not. My primary point was the upgrade is coming with 20.04.2 (why I could see it with apt-cache search..) – guiverc Nov 12 '20 at 10:24

2 Answers2

17

You can install the 5.8 kernel to Ubuntu 20.04 now by running

sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-20.04-edge

The kernel will get updates.

But if you wait some time (it is a matter of days) linux-generic-hwe-20.04 (without edge) will also pull the 5.8 kernel.

Update: Now we have linux-generic-hwe-20.04 pointing to the 5.8 kernel. If you've installed the edge, it is better to remove it by

sudo apt remove linux-{image,headers}-generic-hwe-20.04-edge
sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-20.04
Pilot6
  • 90,100
  • 91
  • 213
  • 324
2

If you want to use different kernels, you can also use the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer. This will let you pick from a variety of kernels, usually long before they make it to Ubuntu's defaults. So, we can add this to the list of choices you can make.

It's pretty straightforward.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cappelikan/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mainline

From there, you just open the application and pick the kernel you'd like to use, install it, and then reboot to use the new kernel. It is fairly intuitive and looks a bit like this:

Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer

The app can be rather annoying with multiple notifications. You can change the frequency of checks in the application's settings. You can also click on 'changes' and see what changes (the changelog) have been made to the kernels.

KGIII
  • 3,968