Re: kernel related (maybe) problems with 7.1

[ABrady <kcsmart kc rr com>]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001 10:33:58 -0400 (EDT) Richard Horvitz
<rhorvitz ececs uc edu> spit forth:

> Hi,
>   I recently upgraded from Red Hat 6.1 to 7.1.  Some things don't work
> anymore.
>   The pppd daemon won't start, it tells me that there is no kernel
> support
> for ppp.  What is going on here?
>   I also have Windows 98 on my machine (which, sigh, is now my only
> access
> to the internet).  Linux no longer recognizes this file system, it says
> that the kernel doesn't recognize vfat file systems.  Why is this?
>   Any help would be greatly appreciated!
>   Thanks,

When I've run across similar things, it's because of incompatiblities
between what was already on the system and what the upgrade could do. My
fix has always been to install from scratch and avoid upgrades between
major releases. Huge library and configuration changes cna then be handled
reasonably well vs. trying to fix the changes and install the proper files
& libraries after the fact.

Version 6.1 to 7.1 was a montstrously big change. Not only the kernel but,
supporting libraries and files, as well as configuration tools, daemons
(xinetd for instance) and other things were totally different in 6.1 and
the upgrade will only upgrade what it can. If xyz-1.2-1.i386.rpm was on
6.1 the upgrade will handle xyz-1.2-1.i386.rpm just fine. But, if no
qrs-anything.i386.rpm existed on 6.1, it won't (by default) install
qrs-2.2-1.i386.rpm because it's only upgrading what already existed, not
adding new packages.

You can still salvage a lot by not formatiing all of the system (/home is
safe, /usr and /usr/local may be able to survive) but, you'd still need to
install from scratch or do a lot of manual labor to fix things. You can
also move lots of config files to someplace safe and use them to recreate
things later. In some instances you can drop them in place of the newly
installed files and they'll work fine.

-- 
If anything can go wrong, it will.