How to upgrade kernel in Redhat Linux

[sanlen]

Hi,

I just install Redhat Linux 3 onto my laptop. i now want to upgrade its kernel to version 2.6.28.4. I download the new kernel from net (linux-2.6.28.4.tar.gz), however, i dont know how to upgrade this.

Can you please give me a guidiance to get this done?

Thanks you very much for your time.

Best Regard
sanlen

[L4Linux]

Red Hat 3 is seriously outdated and probably no longer supported.

Some options you have:
If you want paid support from Red Hat, purchase Red Hat Enterprise 5.
If you want Red Hat, without the paid support, use CentOS. It is exactly the same, but without the Red Hat brand name and paid support.
Use a more desktop oriented distribution such as Fedora 11, which is sponsored by Red Hat and includes the latest innovations of Linux and is more user friendly than the above 2. Or Ubuntu, which is very easy as well. Or any other distribution, of the many that are in Distrowatch.
In distrowatch you can also see which kernel each has. (Look for package "linux", that is for the kernel)
Ubuntu currently has 2.6.28 and Fedora 2.6.29.

[lomcevak]

What's in the compressed tarball?

tar -tzf linux-2.6.28.4.tar.gz

If it's a .rpm file extract it and install it.

tar -xzf linux-2.6.28.4.tar.gz
rpm -ivh <rpm_file>

Then you'll have to reboot.

[sanlen]

It is not the rpm file. I am looking around for rmp file as well, however, i cannot get one. could you please advice?

[lomcevak]

So what's in the compressed tarball? What do you see when you run:

tar -tzf linux-2.6.28.4.tar.gz

[sanlen]

They are files and folders only.

[Ben Cotton]

It looks like sanlen has downloaded source code for the kernel. Generally, building a kernel from source is something you'd only do if you're very comfortable with Linux. Your best bet is to update via your system's package manager, in this case up2date (assuming you have a subscription for Red Hat 3).

I would definitely recommend going with something newer like Fedora or Ubuntu (or RHEL 5 or CentOS 5 if you don't need the faster package updates). Considering the age of the packages provided for RHEL 3, I'm not sure you'd even be able to get that kernel to compile without updating many other packages as well.

[Rubberman]

Upgrading RHEL3 to a 2.6 kernel is not advised (and likely not possible without much wailing and gnashing of teeth). You should upgrade the entire OS to RHEL5. Even so, since RHEL 5.3 is currently running the 2.6.18 kernel, there may well be issues upgrading to the 2.6.28 or later kernels. It is likely you will have to update/upgrade or at least reinstall a LOT of your system servers, drivers, tools, etc. This is not a task for someone without a lot of experience in manually building Linux systems.

That said, is there a specific reason why you need to run RedHat on your laptop? What about a more current, laptop-friendly distribution?

[sanlen]

Thanks Ben and Rubberman.

I now decided to move to 5.3 and i already loaded on to my laptop. I am the newbie to this open source, so i want to learn and test this system that why i install it with my laptop.

I now have another problems. I installed VirtualBox onto my Windows XP host, i then install that Redhat 5.3 as the guest OS. However, it takes me a lot of time to boot this Redhat up, and seem very slow after logging in.

Could you please advise how to tune my Redhat up?

I am using Dell XPS with 4GB of RAM, Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU.

Thanks you very much for your time.

Best Regards,
sanlen

[Rubberman]

1. Enable the hardware virtualization support in the system BIOS (VT-x)
2. Enable hardware virtualization (VT-x) support in VirtualBox for your RHEL 5.3 VM.
3. Allocate at least 1-2 GB of RAM for your VM.

For whatever it's worth, running a RHEL VM under XP on a laptop is not a formula for high performance. However, as a learning tool, that is a reasonable approach to take. Personally, I'd put Linux as the host OS and run XP as a guest, which is what I do on my workstation. On my Dell D630 laptop I have 2 system drives - one with XP and the other with Ubuntu. That way I don't have to deal with dual-booting issues, and switching the system is just about as fast since I leave the screws out of the drive unless I'm traveling. Shutdown, slide drive out, slide other drive in, reboot...