I'm still on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS which has kernel 3.2.0-49, I thought 'old' was 2.6 or really old 2.4. What the heck is going on now, the kernel is already up to 3.11? Did I miss anything good in between? By my perceptions I would have imagined that newest kernel would be around 3.6 or so but I was wrong: https://www.kernel.org/finger_banner
2.4 is really old, originally released in 2001. 2.6 has also been around for a long time, and the release cycle changed during the 2.6 timeframe, so the old release number system no longer makes sense.
Rather than having a major stable release like 2.4, and then a long period of development in 2.5, followed by a stable 2.6 kernel later on, it switched to much shorter merge windows and release candidate cycles that last about 2-3 months. So you had 2.6.x kernels which were new stable branches, and would get patches such as 2.6.x.y.
After a while, this got a little silly. When numbers were getting up to things like 2.6.32.60, it gets hard to keep track of the numbers. Since the first two numbers were just sitting there unused, at some point Linus decided it was silly, and they would cycle to 3, and the second number would be for each stable release.
So yeah, 2.2-2.4 was about 2 years between new stable versions. 2.4-2.6 was about 3 years between new stable versions. But then there have been new stable versions about once every 2-3 months, and new long term supported versions picked from those about once a year (for distributions which prefer to do long-term support on a single kernel version, rather than updating to the latest stable).
> After a while, this got a little silly. When numbers were getting up to things like 2.6.32.60, it gets hard to keep track of the numbers. Since the first two numbers were just sitting there unused, at some point Linus decided it was silly, and they would cycle to 3, and the second number would be for each stable release.
And now we have only one number sitting there unused! Maybe they'll finish the job next time.
The kernel numbering system changed when Linus moved over to v3. Basically the switch from 2.4.x to 2.6.x was the last major change to the Linux kernel. Since then, all the 2.6.x releases have been pretty standard incremental updates. So a few months ago Linus decided it was time to switch to v3 - just to round the numbers off (it wasn't a big nor noteworthy release - it was just an excuse to round the numbering off). So now the the second digit is what used to be the 3rd digit in the 2.6.x releases.
It usually takes distro developers a while to vet kernels and ensure stability with their userspace stuff. 3.7 and 3.8 had a few regressions, and were skipped by a few distros. 3.9 only made it into Debian Stable last month (as a backport from testing).
On Ubuntu, you can always get some newer kernel versions through apt-get, but the default will always be what they consider to be stable (especially for an LTS)
If you want to move to the newer 3.5 kernel line, you can do so. This is what the 12.04.2 LTS is distributed with. Here is the apt-get for that:
sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic-lts-quantal
You will also want to update your x.org install:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-lts-quantal
Note that some older video cards (nvidia I think) have had their support dropped, so this operation may or may not be safe.
Thanks for the suggestion, I found a top level Quantal package and that pulled in the headers too in case anything needs to compile something.
Also, I looked at the X stuff too but it wanted to remove ubuntu-desktop and that seemed pretty drastic so I'm just using the newer 3.5 kernel for now. On this new PC I picked up support for my hot new 1 Gig ethernet, everything else worked fine but now I have an excuse to upgrade to a 1 Gig home router. :) Well once the cable can go fast enough that is. Assuming Google Fiber gets here, they promised Austin but Round Rock might not get it.
