eroica Posted April 25, 2006 Report Share Posted April 25, 2006 hello, I have an old machine running mdk 9.2 w/kernel 2.4.22-10mdk. Upgrading to newer mandriva is out of the question because of hardware constarints. How difficult would it be to upgrade the kernel via urpmi. Has anyone upgraded like this b4. How did it go,what pitfalls etc. Are there any good guides to doing this.Would it be worth while? thanx, alan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liquidzoo Posted April 25, 2006 Report Share Posted April 25, 2006 I've done it before, and it was surprisingly painless. All I did was drop to a CLI interface (init 3) and, as root, type urpmi kernel From there, I was presented with a list of available kernels to choose from ( 1-x ), picked a number, hit enter and it installed away. Even made the lilo modifications, I assume it would do the same for grub. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted April 25, 2006 Report Share Posted April 25, 2006 Im not sure you gain anything by not upgrading fully...unless diskspace really is critical. The later versions should be faster when stripped back to the same level of Window manager etc. The only difference is possibly the init sequence using syslinux but I think that changed earlier - since it needs a certain amount of memory... The difficulty you face in only upgrading the kernel is any deps on the old kernel in terms of modules etc. especially over so many releases and goiung from a 2.4->2.6...you risk incompatibilities over the libc libs etc. If you can install a recent version and then install a light Window manager and deinstall the heavy stuff I think you will end up with a better system all-round I managed to instal Debian testing the other day of a P600 with 64 MB RAM... I used kanotix and it installed KDE but after deinstalling it and the unwanted extras it runs fine... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eroica Posted April 25, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 25, 2006 (edited) when i do a urpmq kernel i get a whole bunch of 2.4 kernels available(enterprise,secure etc). which do i choose. i dont get any choice of a 2.6 kernel. Also in reading it seems that all that is changed is a new vmlinuz & image file. is that correct? Also I tried running newer mdv version w/fluxbox & icewm. but i just didnt like that wm's. I'd rather stick w/kde 3.1. I just thought from a security perspective it might be wise to do an upgrade. But how much woch would i be gaining going from 2.4.22-10mdk to 2.4.22.41mdk? That's the one i would assume i would update to... Edited April 25, 2006 by eroica Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted April 25, 2006 Report Share Posted April 25, 2006 I don't think much, KDE 3.5 is much faster than 3.1 if you turn off the bells and whisltes though... IceWM isn't too bad I find it a good substitute for KDE on slow machines ... at least it feels kinda similar. And the problem with the vmlinuz is the same as the syslinux boot, this is your primary barrier to mixing the old and new. I honestly think if you slim down a current version of mandriva it will perform as well or better than the 9.2 but you will need to deinstall lots of extras... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted April 25, 2006 Report Share Posted April 25, 2006 Upgrading a 2.4.X system to 2.6.X one is far from trivial, and needs quite a bit of Linux experience. The "suprisingly painless" thing above is migrating from a 2.6.X kernel to another one. Even that could be a pain, e.g. migrating from a 2.6.8.X series kernel (devfs based) to a 2.6.13 one (udev based). Unless you are using a Pentium @ 100 Mhz with 16 MB of RAM, I fail to see what the "hardware restraints" could be for installing a modern distro from scratch. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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