Howto upgrade RHEL Desktop 5.1 to next/latest minor version

[napoleaninparis]

Hello,

I am a newbie to RHEL community, but have been using Ubuntu/Debian for quite sometime. Recently I have been provided with a workstation installed with RHEL Desktop 5.1 with sudo root privileges to install/update applications. I would like to upgrade my RHEL to next/latest available minor 5.x version. As I am not familiar with package mgmt and upgrades in RHEL, I searched for ways to do this and found the below command to perform an upgrade (from 5.4 to 5.5 according to the post):

        $yum update

Executing the above command resulted in installation of a number of updates totalling ~700MB. However, when I reboot, the kernel version is still 2.6.18.x and RHEL version is 5.1.x. I have a few queries based on this:

1. Is it possible to upgrade to the latest 5.x version in this way using CLI? If so, is there something I missed?

2. Does the subscription prevent me from upgrading? I believe I have a valid subscription as I am able to download and install updates.

3. The reason I want to upgrade is that some of the apps are older versions and are not updated to latest version after running the update command (Ex browser, gnome/kde etc). Is upgrading the only way to receive latest version of apps or do I need to subscribe to different channels? If so, it would be great if you can direct me to a howto on subscription to different channel.

I understand that this might be a simple query which might have already been asked, but I could not find the information I was looking for based on my search entries (maybe I was using wrong search terms?). Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

[coopstah13]

What you are confused about, is that updating RHEL doesn't update things to newer major or even minor versions for the most part. It will always be kernel 2.6.18, gnome 2.20 or wahtever it is, etc. The updates are for bug fixes and security updates for these versions of the products. RHEL is not an up to date distro for stability reasons.

I would run yum upgrade command instead of yum update though, but you still won't have newer packages.