Kali Rolling Doesn't Update/Upgrade: Stuck With Kernel 4.3.0

[mainframe]

I've scoured questions and answers to this, as well as performing a couple of re-installs to make sure I wasn't crazy. Essentially, I'm trying to install the nvidia drivers per the Kali article on the matter. However this line fails: apt-get install -y linux-headers-$(uname -r)

My kernel version is 4.3.0 (old), and so I ran apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and it seemed to work the first time: I had to answer a couple of prompts (things like the options for ssl, restarting services, etc.) and everything ran successfully. But after rebooting, the kernel version is the same. At this stage, this screenshot tells the rest of the story.
http://imgur.com/bE67nU2

It seems that no matter what I do, I can't get this thing updated. And without that, I feel a) not so warm-and-fuzzy about the state of the box and b) lost as to how to fix it and get those nvidia drivers installed.

Here are some posts that were related, but left me wanting.
https://forums.kali.org/showthread.p...-0-kali1-amd64
https://forums.kali.org/showthread.p...eaders-problem
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...3-0-kali-amd64
https://forums.kali.org/showthread.p...kernel-headers
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kalilinux/c...430kalilamd64/

[mainframe]

Looks like that screenshot is pretty terrible quality, so here's a better version on imgur: http://imgur.com/bE67nU2

[P373]

Have you tried updating Grub2 and rebooting?

update-grub

[mainframe]

Have you tried updating Grub2 and rebooting?

update-grub

Oh man, I hadn't and I was so excited that would fix things, but alas it didn't. I tried both update-grub and update-grub2 but the kernel headers are the same. Isn't grub just the bootloader though? I can't see why that would affect the ability to update the distro. I ask, naively, because this is a multiboot system. I have Windows on one drive, and Ubuntu and Kali splitting the partitions on another drive. I can boot into any of them via grub so that part seems to be working fine. I am relatively new to Kali so if there's something grub-related that could cause this, I'd love to know.

[P373]

What about:

dpkg --list | grep linux-image

[mainframe]

What about:

dpkg --list | grep linux-image

Interesting... here's the output from that:

ii  linux-image-4.3.0-kali1-amd64          4.3.3-5kali4                         amd64        Linux 4.3 for 64-bit PCs
ii  linux-image-4.6.0-kali1-amd64          4.6.2-1kali1                         amd64        Linux 4.6 for 64-bit PCs
ii  linux-image-amd64                      4.6+74+kali1                         amd64        Linux for 64-bit PCs (meta-package)

It seems the packages are there just not actually getting installed?

[P373]

That is Weird. Try rebooting and when you get to the Grub2 screen go to advanced options for Kali and try and choose the right kernel that way. See if it works.

[mainframe]

I tried your suggestion but there was only one option available: rolling. I tried a hail mary with `dpkg --configure -a` but that didn't work either. I think I'm going to try setting up a Kali Live USB stick (w/persistence) in an attempt to see if I can at least get that one to update. I'm totally at a loss at this point.

[mainframe]

I got my Live USB w/persistence stick going. But when I tried to update and upgrade, it failed on gedit-3.20.2-2. Eventually it got into a bad state so I re-installed to the USB and set it up all over again. Same. Exact. Story. Ugggghhh.....

I even tried adding the same url in sources.list but for `deb-src` instead. Didn't make a difference. I even then tried adding the bleeding edge repo to sources.list, but more of the same.

Back to my local install, I tried the --fix-missing flag on all steps. I checked `dpkg ---audit`. Nothing. This thing just will not update.

I'd love to hear of someone that can verify that the most recent image from the site (ie not a sana -> rolling upgrade) can actually be updated. It seems unlikely to me that doing an install and immediately doing apt-get update/upgrade/dist-upgrade would fail four separate times.

I've got a hard drive arriving tomorrow that I'm going to do a fresh install on. This won't be a split partition, it won't be a multiboot system: just Kali Rolling and that's it. I'm going to record the entire process on video. I'm going to paste all console output to patsebin. Every single tangentially-related article/post I can find about this just... ends. No solutions, just... people giving up. I'm not giving up, dammit.

[P373]

I'd love to hear of someone that can verify that the most recent image from the site (ie not a sana -> rolling upgrade) can actually be updated. It seems unlikely to me that doing an install and immediately doing apt-get update/upgrade/dist-upgrade would fail four separate times.

I've got a hard drive arriving tomorrow that I'm going to do a fresh install on. This won't be a split partition, it won't be a multiboot system: just Kali Rolling and that's it. I'm going to record the entire process on video. I'm going to paste all console output to patsebin. Every single tangentially-related article/post I can find about this just... ends. No solutions, just... people giving up. I'm not giving up, dammit.

I run Kali Rolling solely on my laptop and dual boot it on my desktop. Yes it works. After you installed and reboot on your new drive open the terminal and run:

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

Leave out the upgrade part and just go with dist-upgrade.

[mainframe]

I run Kali Rolling solely on my laptop and dual boot it on my desktop. Yes it works. After you installed and reboot on your new drive open the terminal and run:

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

Leave out the upgrade part and just go with dist-upgrade.

I don't want to sound ungrateful/rude but I was trying that from the very beginning. Not only is it all over their docs, it's also just about the only response you can find to similar questions on this forum, stack exchange, etc. So that obviously wasn't the issue.

I'm using past tense because it's resolved now. I got that new hard drive in, and instead of trying to install it to a secondary disk, I just unplugged all my existing drives and pretended like this was the only drive there was. I don't know if this mattered or not, but I elected to not choose a mirror during setup. It made my sources.list file look kind of crazy, but I just fixed it to match the rolling repo. Ran update and dist-upgrade and all was well with the world.

Since this journey started with installing nvidia drivers, I went on to that next. I don't know if this is typical or not, but as soon as I installed the drivers and rebooted I got that annoying "Oh no! Something has gone wrong!" error screen. I restarted the machine making sure to choose the Nvidia card in my BIOS this time, and not using the internal graphics card (which I needed to use up to this point), and that worked just fine.

After all this malarky I've gone through the Kali install process 8 different times. Since I can't say for certain what the cause was, all I can say is that these are the only two things I did differently during the successful attempt:
- made it the only hard drive in my machine (it's now in a usb enclosure and i can boot directly to it just fine)
- elected to not choose a mirror during the setup process, instead opting to fix my /etc/apt/sources.list to match the recommended settings, and only then performing the update/upgrade steps

[P373]

The important part is you got it installed and working. Good job.

[cosmob0y]

hello there. may you be so kind to provide the links to your sources that worked for you, i am experiencing the same problem, cheers!

[lugnutz]

This question has nothing to do with me haveing update errors and i have looked everywhere for this answer with no luck so i figured i would make a post and hope that someone could lead me in the correct direction for a answer..... i am new to kalilinux distro itself i installed the 64 bit rolling 2.0 the other three days ago. 2 days ago after turned on my computer in the notifacation bar it said something along the lines of " critucal security update" and there was a button that said reboot & install well after reboot it installed but did not ask for a superuser password or anything?
is this how kalilinux 2.0 works ? Installing patches like this without superuser permission? Or have i just been paid a visit by the cia lol im lost. Please someone help me with a answer or poit me to someone or a direction that i can find one thank you