[ILUG] Compiling new kernel

[Rick Moen]

Quoting les davis (scratchandsniffmedia at eircom.net):

> Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 18:02:51 +0100

A fine year for cabernet sauvignon.  It's aging well.

> I have installed redhat 9 on my machine....

Well, that's a problem, for starters.  That release was end-of-lifed on
2004-04-30:  Unless you've been doing something frightfully clever,
you've received no security updates since then.  You should _run_ out to
borrow a set of discs for CentOS 4.1, a really good freely
redistributable rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 1.

> and I want to update the kernel as I need it for some media apps. 

Again, you honestly shouldn't.  You need to change your entire
distribution to something that, unlike RH9, isn't _unmaintained_ and a
security nightmare.

> I have followed
> http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/Kernel-Build-HOWTO.html#CONFIGURATION-2-6
> to the letter but when I get to config stage it says to go to $cd
> linux but it just says that directory does not exist ...

Probably, the directory ./linux _doesn't exist_.  When you untar your
2.6.x kernel tree, you should note where it unpacks _to_:  With old kernel
releases, you would always get everything unpacked within a top-level
directory tree of "linux"; more recently it would be linux-n.n.nn, where
n.n.nn is the kernel version number.

You might be well advised to have some of the ILUG lads assist,
in-person, during your first kernel compile.  It's not difficult once
you've gotten the hang of things, but can be intimidating, the first
time.

> Also I want to bring up to the latest kernel 2.6.13, it is currently
> 2.4.20-8, do I have to do it in stages e.g. update it to 2.4.31 first
> then 2.6.x or can I just update it strait to 2.6.x?

Well, that's a reasonable concern:  The 2.4 and 2.6 kernel families are
rather different, and you need, at minimum, to pay a great deal of
attention to what it says in the kernel README about required
dependencies that you might _also_ need to upgrade (and upgrade first).

But really, don't try to upgrade RH9:  Replace it with something less
ancient.

-- 
Cheers,        "Linux means never having to delete your love mail."
Rick Moen                                              -- Don Marti
rick at linuxmafia.com