help upgrading kernel for RH 9.0
 

hi everyone,

I decided to upgrade my kernel and see whether things work better or faster. I know I should be browsing through this forum or search on google for a while to try helping myself first (that's the best way to learn things maybe anyways), however, I would just have several questions here that you gurus could answer me please without any detailed info or step-by-step guidance or whatsoever:

I'm currently on RH 9.0 kernel 2.4.20-8

1) Which kernel should I upgrade to?

2) which files do I need to download

3) where can I get that file / these files from

4) is there anything I need to backup before applying the kernel upgrade?

5) will I lose any information? any settings?

5) Do I need to reinstall things after the kernel has been upgraded such as video card drivers (nvidia), or fluxbox, etc..?

6) does the kernel upgrade take long? (system specs: intel p4 1.3Gbz, 512 RDRAM, Nvidia Geforce 2 MX 400)

7) I've read somewhere that Grub allows you to choose which kernel you want to boot from once it's upgraded - is this correct?

8) once I choose the newer kernel from the grub bootloader, what surprises can I expect or which applications/settings will still work?

9) a lot of questions I know, but I again thank you for your time for reading and helping me out in any way! :)



LINUX RULES!!! over WINBLOZE

ok well go here and read my guide you will not be able to screw up if you follow this....
i would recommend you upgrade to a 2.4 based kernel as of right now, and you will find the site where you get the kernel source in my guide...as of backing up....well you should just backup everyhting you don't want to lose....you have to have the train of thought that something wrong might happen, especially when your doing something like this...so backup everything you have thats hard to get or important data, or whatever it may be.... the only settings you will lose are the ones that you don't compile into the kernel, so this question is up to you when your recompiling on what you lose or save....and now that i actually think of it, the only thing i can think of that you will have to re-install is the nvidia drivers...that is a no brainer...the upgrade will take as long as you make it, i will throw a very rough estimate your way, and say you will lose about 45 mins to an hour of your life.....again very rough estimate....well when you add the new kernel to the grub.conf file then yes you will have both the new and old kernel to boot from...so again something that is totally up to you when you are editing the file....
so i think i covered everything, so good luck in your kernel recompile :D

thanks a lot DrOzz, I knew there is always someone I can count on for help :D hehe

I'll check that all out in a bit and let you know how it ended. I don't really wanna save everything tho, it's like 180GB of data. I believe that if I upgrade the kernel it will only affect my /dev/hda I assume as this is where I have my linux partitions. Am I right? :)

So I should not worry about /dev/hdb and /dev/hdd, then it's all good and I can go ahead and do th upgrading maybe in an hour...and see what comes out :D

thanks again DrOzz

Re: help upgrading kernel for RH 9.0
 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by retiredsoldier

1) Which kernel should I upgrade to?

The latest one for the i686 architecture.

2) which files do I need to download

3) where can I get that file / these files from

Go to Redhat's web site, click "downloads", click "mirror sites", find one near you and click the "Updates" link. From there you shouldn't have any trouble figuring out which file to download.

4) is there anything I need to backup before applying the kernel upgrade?

5) will I lose any information? any settings?

5) Do I need to reinstall things after the kernel has been upgraded such as video card drivers (nvidia), or fluxbox, etc..?

6) does the kernel upgrade take long? (system specs: intel p4 1.3Gbz, 512 RDRAM, Nvidia Geforce 2 MX 400)

No, no, no, no and no.

7) I've read somewhere that Grub allows you to choose which kernel you want to boot from once it's upgraded - is this correct?

Use rpm -ivh to install your new kernel, and both the new and the old kernels will appear in Grub; the old kernel will be the default.

8) once I choose the newer kernel from the grub bootloader, what surprises can I expect or which applications/settings will still work?

No surprises; it just works.

hehe, thanks a lot Mr. Firewall!

You have left some questions unanswered tho :P hehe
I'm gonna do the kernel upgrade later this evening. Gotta get this "Truth And Lies of 9/11 vid" burning as VCD to show to some friends.

If someone is asking what that is, you should get on irc and download it from there, most servers that I visit offer that video...some cop who seems to know the truths and lies of that dramatic event on 9/11 - I'd recommend it to everyone watching it (but this is totally off-topic now :D)

Thanks again!

Like DrOzz's mentioned, you can compile a new kernel.
Or like Mr. Firewall's mentioned, you can use the default kernel provided by RedHat.

You can use Up2Date (RedHat Network) in order to download and install the new kernel automatically.

Once that is done, you can remove the old kernel.
The following command will query the RPM database for all instances of kernel:
Then take the name you obtain from the output list and use the following syntax to remove the kernel:

thanks a lot Mathieu for your advise. I actually kinda followed your suggestion as well as Mr Firewall's and upgraded through rpm.

Nothing against DrOzz, he's still and will be my guru here at LQ :P, but that was some little too much.I haven't maybe really looked at it into details, but it seemed like a lot of steps and some maybe also kinda confusing for a newbie like me.

Anyhow, I want to thank you all for the support and y'all have been great.


Here is what I did:
I downloaded the rpm as well as the source rpm.
Then I installed the i686rpm, made sure it did the RAM Disk as documented through RH's manual :D. /boot/grub/grub.conf was also changed and had the new entry of the new kernel.

first time i restarted, it failed 2-3 processes (one was regarding a ntfs mount which i had in /etc/fstab) - of course, ntfs support wasn't in yet for the new kernel.

then VMWARE needed to be reconfigured and the NVIDIA drivers weren't there - I had to configure X again but that went without any problems.

So after that I went to nvidia's site, downloaded the drivers again, installed it - it said it couldn't. So I had to install the source rpm for the kernel which then allowed me to install the vid drivers - woohoo

after that I got the kernel-ntfs rpm which installed without any problems, so I restarted again and even changed my /boot/grub/grub.conf before to get the new kernel set as default selection upon bootup.

everything went fine! only last thing i had to do was reconfigure vmware with 'vmware-config.pl' - it even asked me whether i wanted to skip some networking configuration and use the pre-existing settings which was another good things i experienced.

after that I tried quake 3 again because it was the actual reason I wanted to upgrade the kernel in the first place - and guess what WOOHOO...now quake works perfectly without any lags (as i've posted on another quake thread here on LQ) - all issues resolved, all programs are working - at least those that I normally use and it couldn't have gone any easier :D

thanks for your time reading this hehe

well, i say someday you'll get your hands dirty and do it from scratch, and that was the point of me making that tutorial for it will be directed for newbies, and that they wouldn't get confused....i think if you would keep that page into consideration you should try it some time, for the knowledge, and just basically to do it, as rpm is sometime the easy way out, and it keeps you from learning something like recompiling a kernel....
to cut my guide short, all you basically have to keep in mind is download the source and untar it to /usr/src and basically just type whatever i say in the guide...theres nothing tricky about it...and the other good thing about it is that i tell you what the step is doing, so its not like you won't know what the command is at the time of typing it...even if you don't understand it right away, you'll gradually learn about it....so maybe you weren't ready for it as of yet, but give it time and you'll be doing it like anything else :P

yep :)
I guess I was just not ready for it, but hey, whenever you posted your reply with that URL in it, I already bookmarked it under my USEFUL INFO (LQ) folder through galeon lol...so it'll stay there forever and I'll definetely look into it later whenever I have more experience with linux. But damn...i love linux more and more every day...:D

thanks DrOzz

no problem d00d, enjoy the journey :p