Re: How Do You Update The Kernel

[Werner Kliewer <Werner_Kliewer MPIC mb ca>]

In article <000001bdecaf$16b2f220$0c9a6ec6 home lssu edu>, Christopher Bellini 
wrote:
> The Red Hat E-mail Support people said I should get the latest kernel to fix
> my problem of not being able to set up my sound card.  Where do I go to get
> an update for the kernel and how do I install it?  I'm new to Linux, if it's
> not obvious by now :)

Having just done this myself, there are newer kernels available for 
downloading as rpm's on Redhat's site, in the Redhat-5.0 and Redhat-5.1 update 
directories. With those, there a file about updating the kernel that points 
you to another page on the Redhat site that has instructions for upgrading a 
kernel.

This latter is very good, but a little dated. I just updated my 5.0 kernel 
from 2.0.32 to 2.0.35-2. I downloaded all the associated files (they all start 
with kernel, have 2.0.35 in them and end in rpm. There were several additional 
files I needed: the rpms for initscripts, SysVinit, modutils and mkinitrd. I 
also updated many others earlier, so there may be other dependencies.

I took RedHat's advice and did not upgrade, but rather installed the new 
kernel files. Many of them have to be installed at the same time because of 
dependencies. Depending on what you already have, you may need to use the 
--replacefiles option. Once that is done, you may have to run the mkinitrd 
program, if you boot from a SCSI hard drive. Then create a new boot disk, or 
change your lilo.conf so that it has entries pointing to both the old and new 
kernels, and run lilo -v. After that, reboot, preferably testing both the old 
and new kernels. The old one may no longer be able to run everything, 
depending on what you have configured, but it should come up. The new one, may 
run everything. but if you had customized the old one. you may have to repeat 
this with the new one.

It all sounds quite complicated. Knowing how lilo works and being able to use 
it is quite important. If you have ever customized your kernel by changing it 
and re-compiling, that also helps. Once you get the hang of it, none of this 
is terribly difficult or time consuming (except downloading the required 
files), but there are numerous places where the system can become un-bootable 
if you are not careful. The how-to's are very helpful in all these areas, and 
I found the Doctor Linux publication from RedHat to be invaluable as a 
collection of all the how-to's, man pages, user guides, etc. The only problem 
is that it gets out-of-date very quickly, so the on-line versions are always a 
surer bet.

Good luck.

Werner Kliewer
Manitoba Public Insurance

"A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate
cake without ketchup or mustard."               -- John Krueger