OK,
I've installed RH9 and although it's taken me a week, I now feel I have everything working, Internet, NTFS (to see my Windows etc), ITE Raid driver, Nvidia drivers, Oh and Red Hat Network Up2date.

All hunky dory and running under Kernel 2.4.20-8.

Now heres the "thing"

I used the Red Hat update agent and downloaded 45 updates various libs etc, but one of downloads being a new Kernel 2.4.20.20-9. After downloading it told me that all the installation had been successful.

I re-booted and my GRUB screen had a new option to boot to the new kernel.

When I select my new kernel 2.4.20.20-9 and boot to that

1) I can no longer start X - problem with video driver
2) I can't see my NTFS drives. (file type not supported on boot)
3) It can't find device Nvnet.
etc.......

What gives

On rebooting back to the original kernel, everything still works great.

2 Questions

1) How do I get everything working with the new Kernel ?
2) Why have a new Kernel, what are the advantages ?

All those problems you have mentioned are kernel-dependent..

ie for ntfs,nvidia,NVnet ( guess that is your network card) you have to install separate drivers for each of them in both kernels separately.. and i think you know how to do it since you have done it for your older one..




For NTFS support go to linux-ntfs.sf.net
and for NVIDIA display driver and NVNet( i think this comes with Nforce driver) go to www.nvidia.com

The Kernel it the heart of an Operating System. It schedules processes to run, does memory management, disk I/O, etc.. etc... and the kernel has all drivers/modules to handle other devices. In fact, the kernel just sits there, waiting for programs to do request something. The task of the kernel drivers is to make any hard drive look like an ordinary hard drive, any scanner/webcam/whatever is a "video 4 linux" device. It's the compatibility layer between your application and the hardware.

Because this component is the central heart of your system, any improvement will speed up your entire system too.

The linux kernel is in active development. The 2.6.0 kernel, being released next year, has major improvements, even features Microsoft hopes to release with their OS in 4 years from now!

The kernel gets tuned/improved with every upgrade, and drivers get improved. My current 2.4.22 kernel does handle some things (via audio) a lot better then the 2.4.20 kernel; read the changelog and you see the kernel is constantly improved. The Linux kernel code can be downloaded from the web, and you can re-build a kernel, also called "compiling". This allows you to create a custom kernel, optimized for your system (cpu) and hardware, and you could remove all kind of features your systems doesn't have.


The kernel itself is stored in /boot, and the drivers/modules are stored in /lib/modules/<kernel version>/ If you boot a new kernel, your previously installed drivers are not be installed here

Just be carefull with playing with your kernel. it's the heart of your system, so you don't want it to be broken because you've played around too much

Perhaps the NTFS file system wasn't compiled/built inside the kernel, but as separate module. (/lib/modules/...../ntfs.o) Using modules is a good thing, except for file systems imho. As root, try "modprobe ntfs" (loads the module), "lsmod" (see what is loaded), and mounting your ntfs drive again. Most kernels are configured to load drivers automatically when you need them though.

About the video drivers; boot into another runlevel first, for example, runlevel 3 (multiuser mode). Try to configure your video card, and use another console to test it. In that other console, log in as normal user, and type "startx", or just "X" (use Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to quit) to test your configuration. There should be some error messages at the console where you've started X. When your X is working again, type "telinit 5" to return to runlevel 5. (graphical login)

This command will be usefull too if you want to extract all error messages from the X server logs: grep -E '\((WW|EE)\)' /var/log/XFree86.0.log It should give you some hints about the problem..

hope this helps