[K12OSN] 2.6 kernel on 4.0.1?

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 10:49, anthony baldwin wrote:
> For my next trick I am considering actually updating to a 2.6 kernel.
> Anyone using 2.6 now?
> I've never updated a kernel besides with yum or apt.
> I found this:
> http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20040315152255759
> Is this advisable for a largely clueless newbie (2 years using k12ltsp)?
> I'm always eager to learn more, but not at the expense of hosery.
> (well, except that it gives me excuses to annoy the good folk on this 
> list with more stupid questions...)

The first thing to learn is how to do a backup/restore so you
don't have to worry about doing too much damage. Also it
helps to have a spare box to experiment so when something
breaks there is no rush to make it work again.

For this specific update, I'd recommend waiting for the
distribution based on fedora core2 which should be out
soon, and this time instead of doing an upgrade to your
existing system, reinstall from scratch and them put
your own stuff back.  A backup is a good safety net
for this but if /home is on it's own partition you can
do a new install without reformatting /home.  I usually
do a 'cp -a /etc ...' to somewhere under my own home
directory so I'll have the old config files for reference
in case I forget how something was set up previously or
I want to paste the old users back from the passwd/shadow/group
files.  You might also have to check /usr/local for anything
you compiled locally to be sure you can rebuild it on the
new installation.  This was the hard part a few years back
when you typically had to customize a system with a lot of
programs not included in the distributions, but now that
almost everything you could want is available in rpms you
may not have anything local to rebuild. Check /opt also
and be sure you have copies of anything you changed under
/opt/ltsp.

If /home isn't on a separate partition, you'll have to
copy the contents somewhere in a way that preserves
ownership and permissions (tar, cpio, 'rsync -a', etc.)
or count on your existing backup method to get them
back.  If you have BackupPC running on another box on
the network you already have the ability to restore
what you had any of the last several days and you can
use the web interface to have it do a quick incremental
just before you update to be sure you have everything.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com