I've just installed Fedora 3, and have a red (!) button on the upper right-hand side of the screen. Yesterday, I clicked this button and downloaded a bunch of updates.

One thing that puzzles me is that I get a dialog headed "Packages flagged to be skipped". The 2 packages are...

1) Kernel
2) Kernel-utils

In both cases, the reason given for skipping is "Pkg name/pattern". I don't know what this means. The "View advisory" button pops up a message saying "No info available".

At the bottom of the dialog is a message saying "According to your preferences you have chosen not to automatically update the above packages. If you would like to override etc..."

It was quite difficult getting my Speedtouch 330 USB up and running on Linux, and I'm worried that if I upgrade the Kernel I'll no longer be able to connect to the Internet. Everything seems to work right now, so I'm reluctant to "fix" anything else!

Is this a valid concern? If I upgrade the Kernel, what other problems might I face?

The "kernel" upgrade is skipped by default. You can uncheck this option as you so desire.

For the benefit of anyone else who has this question, I decided to do the update and see what happens. The Kernel was updated, and my speedtouch modem still works.