I currently am running Debian Sarge (2.4.27 kernel)
on an old Abit BE6-II motherboard with a Pentium III
processor. The board appears to be failing now with
frequent freezes, so a new motherboard (ECS RS482-M)
and cpu (AMD Athlon 64) have been acquired.
However, the new motherboard has an intergrated
graphics chip (ATI Express 200) and an ATI SB400
south bridge. This hardware requires at least a
2.6.11 kernel to work.
It has been proposed to set up a 32 bit version of a
2.6 kernel from backports and first run it on the old
motherboard to check that this 2.6 kernel works okay.
The hardware would then be updated and then the 2.6
kernel would be run on the new hardware.
I don't know a great deal about Linux, so would
appreciate help with the following questions :
(a) Can I download the 2.6 kernel from backports
on to a CDROM and boot the old hardware from
that ? (I would leave the old 2.4.27 kernel
untouched, so that I could also boot the old
hardware with the 2.4 kernel).
The kernel I was thinking of downloading is :-
linux-image-2.6.16-1-686_2.6.16-11bpo1_i386.deb
or possibly
linux-image-2.6.17-2-686_2.6.17-9~bpo.1_i386.deb
Would either of these be okay ?
I want to later upgrade to Etch, so I don't want to
get a kernel version greater than the version that the
stable Etch will have.
(b) Assuming the 2.6 kernel from backports works okay
on the new hardware, is it then possible to
upgrade the new hardware in the normal way
(i.e using apt) to the stable version of Etch
(which, I understand will have a 2.6.18 kernel)
when that is released ?
Any help with the above problem would be much
appreciated.