Brooklyn Linux Solutions CEO wrote:
A kernel upgrade on your own is not a trivial mater,
Yes it is a trival matter unless the system built around the kernel does weird things. In SUSe's case, they don't even distribute the Linux Kernel but their own deriviative.
YES - and this is one of the greatest advantages SuSE has. Feel free to use the standard kernel in your production systems. _Most_ of the time it will work, but this just isn't enough for some systems. I'm not even going to mention the feature patches for lvm, reiser, ide and lots of driver updates.
SuSe was slow to install the mkinitrd
??? /sbin/mk_initrd. _Very_ convenient. The entire SuSE lilo-kernel setup is one big piece of convenience: - no need for you to edit lilo.conf for installing a new kernel you made yourself, just do "make bzlilo". The old default suse kernel is always available as entry "suse" when you overwrite "linux", should you've forgotten a module or to create the initrd or the new kernel has problems for whatever other reason. - creating a config file for a new kernel is _very_ convenient: just use the working, running kernel config as input by issuing "make cloneconfig", which takes the config from the running kernel and applies it to the source tree. - mk_initrd: if you use all the above, all you ever need to do when you compile your own is make cloneconfig [maybe: menuconfig, if you want to change something] dep clean bzlilo modules modules_install; mk_initrd; lilo (if the new kernel has the _same_ version as the old one it's also a good idea to edit linux/Lakefile line 3 and add some string to EXTRAVERSION in order to avoid overwriting the existing modules directory in /lib/modules/)
Ruben
you can't expect them to solve the miriad of problems taht you may encounter.
sigh -
No - but they can make sure a standard kernel compiles and interfaces with their kernal dameon and init system..
Don't see the problem.