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I had installed Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit on my Laptop (host OS) when it was released (around April, 2012) and after applying all the patches (sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get dist-upgrade), the version of Linux kernel is

uname -r
3.2.0-53-generic

Recently I downloaded ubuntu-12.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso and used if for installing a guest OS on top of VirtualBox, the default Linux kernel is

uname -r
3.8.0-29-generic

And 3.8.0-34 is available on doing a dist-upgrade on the guest.

Why is not the kernel version getting upgraded to 3.8.0-* on the host OS even after a dist-upgrade? I am getting the rest of the upgrades though.

Also, because of the kernel mismatch I am not able to install the VirtualBox guest additions.

Praveen Sripati
  • 4,289

2 Answers2

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When 12.04 was first released, the Linux kernel was about 3.2, 3.3. Since then you haven't updated your kernel stack, hence you still use 3.2. But, point releases which you installed recently has the latest available kernel (and others packages) which is 3.8. This is to prevent that .5, 1 and 1.5 years of updates.

In your laptop you can install the latest kernel available using:

sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic-lts-raring
Community
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Braiam
  • 69,112
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According to the Ubuntu Documentation

By default, the 12.04.3 point release will ship with a newer 3.8 Ubuntu kernel from Ubuntu 13.04, and a matching X.org stack. This is based on the 3.8.0 Extended Upstream Stable Kernel Release. The purpose of providing a newer kernel in the 12.04.3 point release is for hardware enablement.

More here.

Praveen Sripati
  • 4,289