Re: dumb question about upgrading the kernel and SATA disks....

[andreimpopescu@gmail.com (Andrei Popescu)]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 09:47:42PM +0000, Michael Fothergill wrote:
> Dear Debian folks,
> 
> I am running Sarge 3.1 r4 on a 1200MHz AMD Duron chip.  I have 256MB of RAM.
> 
> Linux spc1-burn4-0-0-cust262 2.4.27-2-386 #1 Wed Aug 17 09:33:35 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
> 
> uname says that I am running the 2.4.27-2 kernel.  During the installation the installer 
> decided to use this kernel not 2.6.8.  The reason for this flashed by screen rather quickly 
> but maybe it was some hardware issue.....

This is the default kernel for sarge. For 2.6 you should have writen
'linux26' at the prompt.

> What would be a good way to check this out?  I am interested to upgrade the kernel because I 
> am interested to install a SATA hard drive and some of them might prefer to be installed with 
> a 2.6 kernel if I understand it correctly.

But that still doesn't guarantee it will work. Some controllers want
newer kernel than the one in sarge.

> Does anyone know what the latest kernel currently is?  Where does one download it from?  I 
> looked on the web for guides to installing it and found that the instructions instructions on 
> this are quite varied.
> 
> Here is one example.....
> 
> 
> apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.17-6-686 kernel-source-2.6.17 kernel-headers-2.6.17-6-686
> cd /usr/src
> tar xjvf kernel-source-2.6.17.tar.bz2
> rm linux
> ln -s kernel-source-2.6.17 linux

These are instructions to compile a kernel the "generic" way (should
work on any distro).

First you should try installing the kernel available in sarge. Use

    aptitude install kernel-image-2.6.8-3-k7

or if you want to always have the latest kernel available in sarge then

    aptitude install kernel-image-2.6-k7

If that one doesn't work than you could try www.backports.org, but if
you go beyond a certain version (2.6.12?) you will have to upgrade other
stuff as well. Either way read the instructions at backports very careful.

HTH,
Andrei
-- 
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)