ByteEnable walks you through the steps of getting kernel 2.6 running on Fedora Core 1.

As the article name suggests, we will be upgrading Fedora Core 1 to the 2.6.4 kernel. Upgrading to the 2.6.X series of kernels offers several layers of enhancements for the Linux user. If your hardware is more than three years old, chances are, you will probably only benefit in a performance increase and possibly get some power management features, depending on your BIOS. Loosely speaking, the performance gain over a 2.4.X series of kernels can be as high or greater than 10 percent (depends on your tasks). If you are not using some hardware features on you system due to lack of drivers, 2.6.X packs a powerful punch in this area. Its has USB 2.0, WiFi, ATAPI and all kinds of drivers for hardware I have never even heard of. There are of tons of little tweaks here and there, but when you add them all up, its capacious. Once you install the kernel and run "make menuconfig" and browse through the menus, you will understand why this is such an impressive release. Speaking of "make menuconfig", this has even been tweaked. Menuconfig is less cluttered and arranged more logical. There is no more "make dep" command either, just make the kernel. Less is always good when having to type on the command line :) .

I've found that the 2.6 kernels from Fedora Core development tend to lag behind kernel.org and are often full of patches that are not really needed for x86 users using Fedora Core. One of Fedora Core's thorns is the legacy compatabiltiy with previous versions of Red Hat releases. Publicly they claim they no longer support anything below Red Hat Release 3, but one look in a spec file will show that 99% of the spec file is for legacy Red Hat. The 2.4 series of kernels that Red Hat uses are so heavily patched that most of the time you could not just plug and play from kernel.org without asking for some trouble somewhere. Fortunately, 2.6 is still new and Red Hat hasn't had time to patch it :) .

From my experience, the 2.6 kernels from kernel.org are plug and play. So you don't have to wait on Red Hat. I'm currently running the 2.6.4 kernel on my laptop with an ATI Mobile 7500 video adapter. I would be running the 2.6 on my dual Pentium 3 but I have an NVidia 5700FX AGP graphics adapter. The current NVidia binary driver (5336) fails to work with kernel 2.6 (it hangs when XFree86 starts). The default XFree86 driver will work without acceleration, however, since I play Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004, acceleration is a must. Until NVidia fixes their driver, I'm still stuck using the 2.4 kernel. When compiling new software you may encounter failures due to the package not being 2.6 kernel aware (or hardcoded for 2.4). Don't fret, just wander over to the development depository [1] and download the latest version from there.

First you will need to retrieve the kernel from www.kernel.org [2]. Once you have that downloaded, install the kernel using these steps:

• su root
• cd /usr/src
• tar jxvf /home/me/linux-2.6.4.tar.bz2
• cd linux-2.6.4
• make mrproper
• cp /boot/config-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl .config
  

Copying your old config gives you a head start in configuring your kernel. It could take an hour or more to go through all of menuconfig diligently. It would be nice to have some pre .config file's based on systems and motherboards. That would make life simpler.

You are now ready to run “make menuconfig” and setup your kernel. Menuconfig should look like this:

[3]

Now select your processor type.

[4]

The default sound architecture for 2.6 is ALSA.

[5]

Fedora Core 1 still uses OSS by default. So we will need to setup that up correctly also.

[6]

Exit and save changes. That should do it. Now just type:

make bzImage && make modules modules_install

make install

You will want to edit your boot config file and remove ide-scsi statement. Its not needed with the 2.6 kernel. For example, a grub.conf file would look like so:

title Fedora Core (2.6.4)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.4.img

You may need to change "root=LABEL=/" to "root=/dev/hdXX". Where is X is the drive and partition of your root Linux install, mine is hda1.

That's it! Reboot and enjoy.

Here is my desktop, KDE 3.2.1, kernel 2.6.4, with kpackage running.

[7]

Use this spec file [8] to enable kpackage in KDE 3.2.X. If you have any questions you can ask them in the forum [9].


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