Been upgrading two computers over the last week or so in my spare time. Thats not alot when you live with your firlfriend 8^)..

Thats why all the questions of late..

One of my machines i have upgraded from 7.2 to 7.3 & is mainly going to be an IDS monitor running puresecure (www.demarc.com) internal NTP server & be my mailserver. Theres an easy feature in the latest version of RedHat where the up2date tool kind of works in the background for you letting you know when there are newer files/programs available from their network. Not too bad a feature i suppose.

I've noticed though that in regards to the kernel it seems to do an install rather than a upgrade or freshen so now i have both these installed.

kernel 2.4.18-3 System Environment/Kernel The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
kernel 2.4.18-4 System Environment/Kernel The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)

I DO NOT want to mess up the O/S but know that installing a second kernel instead of upgrading is the normal way to go (for testing) but once you boot with the new kernel & it is working as it should be you are able to delete the older version. I am getting this error

Failed to delete package kernel :
error: "kernel" specifies multiple packages

It seems that the Linux Kernel is being improved upon often & want to stay recent but in saying that, only with one ,not several..

Is it safe to do a forced removal you think ???


regards andrew

What you do, in any case of upgrading the complete kernel is downloading the entire kernel source from www.kernel.org, it's around 32 megs, hope you got a dsl or above, then you untar it and configure the kernel, make it, make install it and also the modules. After that you rename your bzImage into whatever kernel version you downloaded, then you move it to the /boot folder and then edit lilo or grub to tell it to add that new kernel into the boot program. Then in lilo you need to run it, /sbin/lilo, and then just reboot and choose that one to boot from. If everything works perfectly then just erase the older kernel boot from lilo or grub and that's pretty much all need to do. Deleting the older kernel is really just not needed, it's only like 1.5 to 2 meg file. You don't need to "uninstall" the kernel, it doesn't work like that.

oh, almost forgot. If you don't want to download the entire kernel, then download the patches and install them ontop of the arleady existing kernel to upgrade it, , have fun.

zlinuxz