Hello.... I've got some hardware issues I'm trying to get by and I'd like some input on which direction to go in.

I installed the stable Debian 3.0 with the 2.2.20 idepci kernel on my AMD athlon machine. Pretty good, but had to use the VESA driver for my vid card, and no support for my audigy soundcard.

I tried with no success to upgrade to the 2.6 kernel and the 2.4 kernel using instructions from several different sources. Not sure where I went wrong. Should I keep trying to do that?

Or should I download the sarge Debian with the 2.6 kernel and install that from scratch? Theres nothing important on my hard drive and wouldn't mind reformatting at all.

Which would be easier from a newbie perspective?

Thanks!!!

I've had woody -> sarge upgrades go bad on me before (glibc wasn't upgraded properly, broke everything), but then again, it was in a very nonstandard environment (UML). My advice would be to give it a try but keep sarge install disks around in case things get b0rked beyond repair.

This is probably a pretty good idea, you also might want to use a scratch .config so there are no old options conflicting with the new ones.

If you're going to upgrade regardless, try doing an upgrade through apt. This is a strong point of Debian, not having to reinstall to upgrade. I don't think (not 100% sure) the 2.6 kernel is available or compatible with woody.