Hello forum

Just when I thought I was knowledgable enough in Linux to graduate from being a newbee, I am having to ask a newbee question once more.

I am attempting to get ivtv to work in Red Hat Enterprise 4 (RHEL4) but after looking at the ivtv documentation, it appears that I am running a linux kernel that hasn't even been released yet.

According to "uname -r", I am running kernel version 2.6.9-55.ELsmp. But according to the ivtv documentation, the latest kernel for ivtv is version 2.6.22.1, which is also the latest release of the Linux kernel as of this writting.

It seems to me that 2.6.9-55 is greater than 2.6.22.1.

Would someone mind shedding some light my way?

Thanks,
Roy

Right now I don't remember the exact meaning of all the numbers in kernel version, but yours is older since is a 2.6.9 kernel (release 55.ELsmp) against the last 2.6.22 (stable release 1 or something similar). Cheers

You are using kernel 2.6.9, the -55.ELsmp is added by RedHat to differentiate it from other RedHat kernels. I do not know RedHat's serial numbering scheme, so I can't explain it to you. I suspect the smp means the kernel is built with SMP support.

Notice that the third number in your kernel is a 9 and the third number in the latest stable release is 22.

55.ELsmp is just red hat rubbish. 55 probably either means its the 55th build of that kernel or its their 55th patch set update to that kernel release, EL is just Enterprise Linux and smp stands for Symmetric multiprocessing with is support for more than one core/processor.

Thank you.

I was erroneously thinking those groups of numbers separated with periods were decimals.

Roy