upgrading kernel in debian...
 

Hi!

I have Debian stable running with a 2.6.8 kernel. I have a need to upgrade to 2.6.9 or higher. What is the safest way to do this? This is on an embedded machine and I can't afford to bork the system.

My first try was a dist-upgrade by changing /etc/dev/sources.list to read "testing" instead of stable followed by apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. Looking at the package list, it looked like it was going to DOWNGRADE the kernel to 2.4. That is, it started downloading 2.4 with no mention of 2.6.8.

So again, since that failed, what's a better way of doing this?

Cheers,
Nick

If you have physical access to the machine (and it's capable of booting from CD) you might do a net-install with Etch sources. The hazard off course, is loosing your data while doing so...

One safe way is to change the sources.list back to Etch (Testing) and run aptitude to find and select the latest available kernel. According to the official Debian package list for Testing, the latest kernel-image is 2.6.15-8.

<edit> you may want to download the kernel-image by hand and install it with dpkg, if dependencies come up you could easily get the required packages from the same source and install them at the same time.</edit>