Re: [PLUG] Re: Help with source after kernel update

[Bill Jonas <bill@billjonas.com>]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 02:43:17AM -0500, Rupert Heesom wrote:
> How do I get the "-14" from kernel.org?  From what I've gathered, the
> patches only cater for the last of the 3 main numbers - "x.x.patch-x",
> so I can't be sure that what I'm downloading from kernel.org is the same
> version as the RPMs that I've found.

I presume you're using RedHat?  See, the "official" kernels that
have been "blessed" by Linus have version numbers of the form X.Y.Z
(Actually, that's not quite true -- the development pre-patches are
of the form X.Y.Z-preA, but you should stay away from those unless you
doing kernel hacking).  Because this is Free Software (or Open Source,
if you prefer), anybody can make modifications and release those --
and many of the distributors do.  They'll add patches and things
like that.  For example, Mandrake distributed 2.2 kernels with the
USB backport, before Linus officially incorporated it into 2.2.18.
In order to differentiate that they aren't "Linus-approved" releases,
they'll add extra strings to the kernel version.  RedHat kernels have
a version number like X.Y.Z-B, to indicate that it's a version of the
kernel based on Linus' X.Y.Z; Mandrake does X.Y.Z-mdkC, and so on.

> Why did the RPM source work when I couldn't get the tar source to work?
> The only thing that seemed to be holding me back when using the TAR
> source was the VERSION of the source, which brings me back to the
> questions I was asking above...... Any ideas on that??

You'd want to either use the same version of the source that your kernel
was built from, or build a new kernel from the offical source.

BTW, the ".config" that we spoke of is the file that contains the
configuration information for your kernel.  It's located in the top-level
kernel source directory.  For example, if you have your kernel source in
the /usr/src/linux directory, it'd be /usr/src/linux/.config -- it's a bit
easier to redo things or make incremental changes to your config if you
use the old .config, which may or may not be stored on your system
somewhere.  (For example, if you use the kernel-package program in Debian
to make .debs of your kernel image and modules, the kernel config file
would be in /boot/config-X.Y.Z.  I don't know how other distributions
handle this.)

-- 
Bill Jonas                | "In contrast to the What You See Is What You
bill@billjonas.com        |  Get (WYSIWYG) philosophy, UNIX is the You
http://www.billjonas.com/ |  Asked For It, You Got It operating system."
http://www.debian.org/    |  --Scott Lee, as quoted by Lamb and Robbins


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