Upgrading the kernel in Debian


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ive never really trusted doing kernel upgrades other than manually, i guess thats just me though.. but of course automatic upgrades of kernels would be nice in the future ;)

as for your questions, i dont use debian so im not sure ;P .. but compiling it manually is not that hard

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I upgraded from the 2.2 Kernel to the 2.4 Kernel by using "apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-686". It downloaded the pre-compiled Kernel and installed it. Maybe you could do something like that.

Be sure to keep a boot disk handy, in case you get a Kernel Panic.

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Is there a way I can upgrade the kernel using apt? I want to upgrade to the 2.6 kernel.

A precompiled Kernel 2.6.3 is available through apt-get.

The kernel source is also optionally available in case you wish to compile it yourself.

I got my Knoppix up and running on 2.6.3 (from 2.4.24) with only one problem.

For whatever reason, I needed to add vga=normal for 2.6.3 although vga=791 worked fine for 2.4.24

This is probably specific to my video card but I'd thought I'd mentioned it. If you get kernel 2.6.3 loading.........................................successful and then a blank screen then you need to add vga=normal to lilo.conf

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ive never really trusted doing kernel upgrades other than manually, i guess thats just me though.. but of course automatic upgrades of kernels would be nice in the future ;)

as for your questions, i dont use debian so im not sure ;P .. but compiling it manually is not that hard

Yeah, I'd always recommend you do it yourself. Precompiled = bad, at least for kernels. You never know what they put inside them, and they really never put what you need. Even stuff like hotplug doesn't even always get your hardware right.

For whatever reason, I needed to add vga=normal for 2.6.3 although vga=791 worked fine for 2.4.24

This is probably specific to my video card but I'd thought I'd mentioned it. If you get kernel 2.6.3 loading.........................................successful and then a blank screen then you need to add vga=normal to lilo.conf

It probably didn't have vesa enabled or had something set wrong in the framebuffer stuff. It's actually not that hard to compile your own kernel, but it is one of those things that keeps people away from experimenting with Linux.

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It probably didn't have vesa enabled or had something set wrong in the framebuffer stuff. It's actually not that hard to compile your own kernel, but it is one of those things that keeps people away from experimenting with Linux.

I've compiled a Kernel before with my ill-fated attempt to install Gentoo (it took too long).

I really don't see the point. It'd be what 2% faster with the PCMCIA support?

Maybe it would fix my VGA=791 issue. It's not worth trying to find out.

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You are lazy. And it is worth trying out. Compiling the kernel takes all of 20 minutes including the configuration for me. Not much time if you ask me.

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