you can verify that you have the 2.6.32-5 kernel with uname -r
which is the latest for debian stable. The question is: "Do you need a newer kernel? or do you just want to make sure your kernel is up to date"? If you need a newer kernel because there is some feature or hardware support that you are missing, you can enable the backports repository and get the 3.2 kernel from there. There are instructions for backports here. After enabling the backports repository, you can run apt-get -t squeeze-backports install linux-image-$arch
where $arch is the string you get from uname -r
which is probably one of {486,686,amd64}.
If you just want to verify that your kernel is currently, you can check the current version of the kernel package you have installed with apt-cache policy linux-image-$(uname -r)
and look at the Installed: and Candidate: lines. They should be the same. You can also compare this version for the current listed version for "stable-sec" (meaning stable security) in the package tracking system.
When comparing kernel versions, you should not confuse the current kernel ABI version 2.6.32-5 with the current version of the linux-2.6 pacakge, which looks similar. At this time the current version of the 2.6.32-5 kernel is 2.6.32-45.
Update:
as @bahamat correctly points out, you can't get a complete picture from uname -r
, however /proc/version
contains more complete information. if you look at the output of cat /proc/version
you should see something like:
Linux version 2.6.32-5-686 (Debian 2.6.32-45) ([email protected]) (gcc version 4.3.5 (Debian 4.3.5-4) ) #1 SMP Sun May 6 04:01:19 UTC 2012
This tells us that the currently running kernel comes from the 2.6.32-45 version of the linux-image-2.6.32-5-686 package. If this package version here differs from the version of the linux-image-2.6.32-5-686 coming from the Installed:
line from apt-cache policy
, then it might be that you just need to reboot into the newer kernel.
If they still differ after a reboot, then you probably need to reconfigure your bootloader.