I am looking for someone who has upgraded a Debian Woody kernel.

I am currently running 2.2.x.
I am trying to mount a smbfs and am getting a message that smbfs is not supported in my kernel.

I'd like to go to 2.4.x but am nervous.

I guess upgrading via apt is an option. The right option?



Any help would be appreciated.

I do not know debian, but the subject seems not to be distro-dependent.
The change from 2.2.x to 2.4.x kernel is not so easy. At least glibc relies on kernel header files - they should be the ones which glibc was compiled against.
So just running 2.4.x kernel witout recompiling the other packages will crash the system.

For solving your problem the better way is to configure and recompile (the latest version) of the 2.2.x kernel.

Do:
apt-cache search kernel-image-2.4

It then displays some different kernels.

You could use 2.4.18-bf2.4 or 2.4-686 or 2.4-386

If in doubt, do apt-cache show package.
Where package is the name of the kernel you want more info about.

When you found one do f.ex.:
apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-bf2.4

These kernels use initrd, to implement them. The install will modify your lilo.conf to include the new kernel, and it will keep the old under Linux.old, so if something went wrong you can always boot the Linux.old to boot from the old kernel

Excellent!
Just the info I was looking for.

Any risks involved?

I'm not going to try to reinvent the wheel. here's a great tutorial on compiling the kernel the Debian way:
http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html

BTW, I would recommend against apt-getting the kernel-image, but instead downloading it from www.kernel.org

Only problem I can think of is that you will most likely want to install and configure the iptables. ipchains is available for compatibility, but I'd recommend just making some new iptable rules.

Luck!

I have upgraded from woody to the latest kernel many times.This is the process that I go through.

1. update source-list and apt-get install kernel-package wish bin86 gawk libcurses5-dev flex bison make gcc less bzip2 wget.

2. apt-get install kernel-source-2.4.XX

3. switch to root and cd /usr/src and extract the newly downloaded kernel

4. make xconfig (or menuconfig,config).

5. set all my options,etc.

6. make-kpkg clean

7. make-kpkg --revision=custom_name.number.whatever kernel_image

8. make-kpkg modules_image

9. cd .. , dpkg -i newkernelname.deb

10. shutdown -r now and done.

Hate to link to the "old forum" but here is a great thread that I use when I need to recompile...

http://www.linuxjunior.org/cgi-bin/p...=Display&id=12

Same procedure works on Debian Woody.