questions about upgrading kernal
 

Hello all.
After stumbling upon that nice kernal build -how to I decided to give it a try. My motivation for doing so was because my wireless connection only kind of worked (it would decide to stop working after about 10 minutes of being activated), my laptop seemed quite hot and I'd heard that power management features have been improved in new versions of the kernal, and people had mentioned that the ATI mobility UI card worked with 3D accelleration in the new kernal.

My previous version of the kernal was the one included in the most recent redhat distribution. I was trying to upgrade to the 2.6.2.

The building and installing went fine. I was a bit clueless in the configuration part but I just imported my configuration from my previous kernal version changing only a few options as suggested by the how-to. In particular I tried to enable the power managment features (sorry I forget their appropriate names, ACPI or something) to get the laptop to run cooler and with battery managemnt features. I also tried tinkering with the graphics drivers to disable all features not related to the ATI mobility UI, I also included the VESA generic driver because I new taht worked.

After installing and rebooting there were several errors, the first time it said kernal panic and that it couldn't find a specific file. I rebuilt the kernal making sure the ext2/3 features were built into the kernal. This time it booted up fine save some error messages I couldn't understand. THe fist thing I tried doing when it was booted up was adding my wireless card which was not detected by default. I tried clicking the add button in neat and it just froze up and gave me a message that there was a bug. I couldn't add my wireless card.

The next thing I tried doing was changing from the VESA driver to the ATI mobility UI driver. I reboot and it couldn't start the XServer.

So after all that babbling. I'm asking for any advice that you think pertains to my situation. In particular - is upgrading from a 2.4x kernal to a 2.6 kernal a bit too involved for a newbie? Should I be trying an earlier version that 2.6? If so what is a solid vesion that will give me the power managment features, has a chance at making my wireless connection morestable, and not so importantly, will give me better graphics support..

Thanks muchly

More error messages would help in determining your problem.

Overall though, compiling a kernel is not that hard really. There are tons of threads discussing this with great info. But I think every newbie should compile one sometime or another, to familiarize yourself with the process. But one word of advice, unless theres some kind of security vulnerability, there is never really a reason you have to update your kernel if the current one already supports all of your hardware.

Also, its spelled kernel and not kernal.. ;)