Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 10, Kernel

#89 Upgrade Your Kernel to 2.6

HACK

HACK

#89

Upgrade Your Kernel to 2.6 Hack #89

Hot rod your computer with a new kernel.

Upgrading your kernel from one minor version to another quickly becomes

old hat. But when a new major series of kernels comes out, such as the

recently released 2.6 kernel series, many people are left scratching their

heads not knowing exactly how they should move to this new version.

In this hack, you will migrate from a 2.4 series kernel to a 2.6 series. This

hack assumes you know how to compile a kernel and that you have com-

piled the 2.4 series before

[Hack #88]. Starting in mid-2004, most distributions

released 2.6 series kernels. If you don’t want to compile your own 2.6 kernel

but you do want to take advantage of its new features, check your distribu-

tions package manager to see if there is already a 2.6 kernel for you to use.

Get the Source

The first step is to grab the latest version of the 2.6 kernel from http://www.

kernel.org/, and save it to /usr/src. Then you should extract it and rename

the resulting directory to linux. If you have compiled 2.4 before you should

rename that source code to something unique such as linux2.4.

With the source code installed, you should read the Changes file in /usr/src/

linux/Documentation. This file gives you a list of points and some notes

about the changes you will find in the new kernel. More importantly,