[ale] RH kernel upgrades (was 'Re: miscellaneous questions')

[linuxhat at mailandnews.com]

On 2 Sep 1999, Ben Phillips wrote:
>
>BTW, I ended up just slapping in a good old .tar.gz kernel distrib.  Is this
>bad under RH?  If so, why?

Only reason this is bad is if you then try to RPM something dependent on
kernel level; you may have to rpm -f the thing at that point... but other 
than that (and there are very few things that depend on kernel level, as 
opposed to library level)... One thing to do to keep things straight when
you do drop a new kernelsource in:

# rm /usr/src/linux (this is a symlink)
# tar -C /usr/src -xvzf linux-2.x.y.tgz (creates linux subdir)
# mv /usr/src/linux /usr/src/linux-2.x.y
# ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.x.y /usr/src/linux

That keeps the /usr/src/linux symlink straight and preserves your
versioning; it also makes things happy when you #include <asm/> or <linux/>
files.  

Also, go into /usr/src/linux/Makefile and set EXTRAVERSION before doing
anything with modules; this will keep your own tweaks to a given version
of the kernel separate in /usr/lib/modules from everyone else's.  

-- Glenn, RHCE
"I'm not a slave, I'm a PERSON.  My name is Anakin."