After spending to much time trying to jump from some mutilated linux installation to some
latest kernel I decided to keep up with the patchlevels. Which
means at one point I started with 2.4.18bf from a net-install and then managed to gradually upgrade it
to the latest version. The big advantage is that it's easier to figure out what went wrong with a small
patch, while it's almost impossible to realise what broke and how when bigger steps are taken, even
more when they are mixed with hardware changes. The trap of running a server is of course that you get
in the habit of only rebooting for a hardware upgrade, and then combine that upgrade with all the
accumulated software and firmware upgrades that require a reboot. And then it's hard to find out what's
to blame when things go wrong...
The procedure is:
- Get the incremental patches from kernel.org (not the non-incremental patch)
- Run bzcat ../patch-n.n.n.n-n+1.bz2 | patch -p1 in /usr/src/linux
- Follow the packaging steps
posted on Saturday, May 21, 2005 2:24 PM