9.0 upgrade?
 

I was wondering I am running Suse 9.0 2.4 kernal on a dual boot with Millenium. Everything works fine. I was wondering if there would be any real benefit to upgrading to 9.1? Are there any major improvements? Also, if this type of upgrade exists, is it free or not.

Thanks
Frank

moving to the 2.6.x kernel has better cd-burning capabilities. On the other hand, I believe the saying "If it isn't broken, don't fix it." If your distro does everything you need, why make any changes. Now, 9.1 was an awesome distro to me. 9.2 I'm still fighting with. You can keep everything the same and just upgrade the kernel to the current stable version and get that cd-burning, among other little things, but its up to you.

Hi,
Thanks for the information. I tend to agree. Everything is working fine. However, I am curious about how to upgrade the kernal. Is that a complicated procedure or something you download from the Suse site.

Thanks
Frank

Some people disagree with my method, but it has never failed me on SusE or any other distro



make clean
make mrproper
make oldconfig
make menuconfig
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9
mkinitrd -k vmlinux-2.6.9 -i initrd-2.6.9

Now edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst

Add this entry, you could leave out the comments or put in your own
### New 2.6.9 kernel ###
title linux-2.6.9
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinux-2.6.9 root=/dev/hda3
initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd-2.6.9

Thanks for the information, on the kernal upgrade. I don't feel quite confidant in my skill level to attempt that yet, afraid I might screw things up. Think I will wait until I learn more. Any recommendations on a good tutorial book? I seem to learn better by doing than just reading. A book that has maybe some practical exercise as you complete a chapter would be nice.

Thanks
Frank

I'm looking at upgrading to the 2.6 kernel so I can install NDISWrapper (not supported on 2.4.21 as far as I can see).

SuSE have a link to a 2.6 kernel RPM for 9.0 (http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/se...ing_to_26.html) - has any body had any luck with these at all?

The idea of using an RPM sounds simpler but the instructions aren't as comprehensive as musicmans :scratch:

One other question - if I upgrade the kernel either by RPM (although double checking that link I think the 9.0 RPMs have been replaced by 9.2 upgrades RPMs) or from scratch using musicmans instructions, will YAST cope with that with the online update and start patching the 2.6 kernel instead of the 2.4.2 kernel?

Thanks,
Keith

YasT should have the ability to make the necessary changes to all the configuration files and it can install RPM packages, so it will probably work. The method I posted gives you the control to remove/add certain drivers, modules, and features by using the make menuconfig. The RPM will likely contian support for almost everything and every driver making your kernel larger than it needs to be.

Hi musicman - thanks for the speed reply :D You got there before I was able to edit my last post with the additional question (although you've already answered half of it!!!).

Would Yast cope OK with patching the new kernel properly after install? At the moment it has an annoying habit of moving the wlan-ng drivers on a USB device I have back to an old version (that doesn't support my USB device :mad: ) every time it patches the kernel.

Another question regarding the upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6. The link I gave above indicates that modules.conf isn't used and I need to generate a modprobe.conf file. Is this still necessary when doing a source build rather than an RPM install of the new kernel?

Thanks again,
Keith

It probably will cope "ok", but your trusting an automated script to digure out what is best for your system. I'd rather do it myself. YasT is a great tool, and I use it for updating everything except kernels because I want control.

I build my hardware into the kernel, I try not to use modules but sometimes you have to. For instance, dm_mod for Device Mapper, SD_mod for SCSI disks (usb drive), and my parallel port because VMware states that it has to be a module. I've never had to generate a modules.conf, I figure that the "make modules_install" does that, but I could be wrong. I've never had an issue of my systems not auto-loading modules, so I must be doing something right.

It worked! Kind of...
 

Well my first kernel build was partially successful :D

The previous instructions in this thread worked nicely for building a new bootable 2.6 kernel from a freshly downloaded source file (2.6.10 as the latest stable release). Unfortunately there have been a few side affects...

First up the bootsplash screen has gone. Having said that there is another thread on here that discusses this problem so I won't go into it now.

Second, SuSE seems to want to do a complete hardware reinstall after the first reboot into the new kernel and has no settings from my previous 2.4.2 kernel :( . Is this normal behaviour or have I missed out something that should have sorted this for me?

Lastly the 2.4.2 wireless drivers (had to boot back to this one temporarily after mistyping the new lines in menu.lst :o ) have disappeared again (not a big issue as I can rebuld them fairly quickly). Am I right in assuming that this is because some of the main system reference files in /etc like modules.conf have been updated for 2.6 during the build?


Frank - Apologies for hijacking your thread - hopefully I can turn my pain into your gain ;)

Re: It worked! Kind of...
 

After a bit of experimentation thought I'd fill in some of these...

Another thread on here (Hibernation with SuSE 9.0, Kernal 2.6.3 and Bootsplash) covers some of this.

Another helping hint I found in an old issue (March 2004) of Linux Magazine included changing the lilo.conf (or menu.lst) files to vga=normal and make sure that you built the kernel with CONFIG_VT set to tue.

Missed something vital to an upgrade to 2.6 - bulding the modprobe.conf file!

A bit of poking around showed that YAST knew about all of the hardware and settings that should have been there (and thought they were all working!), but Linux itself didn't...

Running the following command from the /sbin directory on the 2.4 kernel sorted this out:

One suggestion (I had already bulit the kernel and was just trying to get it to work properly by this stage!) in the article I referred to above was to use the RPM included in the SuSE distro for a test 2.6 kernel to get the majority of the config work out of the way and then build a newly downloaded kernel from there.


Apologies to those out there that find these things obvious :o