On Sun, 02 Feb 2003 13:27:47 +0100 Oliver Ob <ob_ok@gmx.net> wrote:

In things of upgrading Suse I have read about updating for instance from 7.3 to 8.1 and some questions arise in my head.

As far as I have learned the largest difference between 7.3 and 8.1 is the new kernel, and therefore now my question:

Couldnt I simply get me the new sources for 8.1's kernel and compile it on my 7.3 system?

You could do that with the vanilla kernel for sure. But suse's kernel is heavily patched to work with the latest software, so you probably would run into glitches. Even with the vanilla kernel, you would probably need to upgrade certain of your programs to use the new kernel. There have been alot of changes since 7.3. Read /usr/src/linux/Documentation/Changes to get a list of the program levels you need.

Or what more changes would I have to do since I would like to keep my now installed software?

Well the biggest problem you run into is newer programs, or updated versions of your existing programs, usually require later versions of their development libraries, like glibc, gtk, qt and various kde libs. -- use Perl; #powerful programmable prestidigitation