On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, John Summerfied wrote:
Anthony Messina wrote:
-pmr
yum has a service for nightly update in fc4 (and maybe others). why don't
you edit the associated scripts to only download the packages, not install
them? that would be the identical behavior that ms allows, or you could
choose to have them automatically applied by just enabling the current
service. as another writer mentioned, you kernel is never updated per se.
the new one is just installed and /etc/grub.conf is changed to boot into
the new one, but your old kernel stays safe and sound.
Making the new one bootable is certain to create a system that will not boot,
shutdown or fail in some other way without manual intervention. It happened
several times during the life of FC3 to my certain knowledge, I believe it
happened to many with FC4 and it almost certainly will happen during the life
of FC5.
Installing new kernels is fine. Automatically making them bootable is not,
and that's not taking into account those who wish to boot something
altogether different, such as Windows, FreeBSD or Another Distro.
This behavior is controllable via /etc/sysconfig/kernel. One of mine
contains:
# UPDATEDEFAULT specifies if new-kernel-pkg should make
# new kernels the default
UPDATEDEFAULT=yes
# DEFAULTKERNEL specifies the default kernel package type
DEFAULTKERNEL=kernel
So if you want new kernels to not be made the default, change
UPDATEDEFAULT to no. Then the new kernel is installed alongside the
old one, but the old one remains the default. (Can ya do that with
Windows?)
I've never tried it, but it wouldn't be too surprising if when the default
kernel isn't Linux, it isn't overridden. In any case, the above change
would take care of the problem.
New kernels will mostly work for most; many had problems with FC3 kernels and
USB. New hardware (mobos, SCSI, yoy name it) is likely to give grief. People
who must build their own wireless or infernal modem drivers are adversely
affected. I rebuild to include NTFS so I need the source, not the binaries
while others download the NTFS binaries.
There are RPMs for NTFS that contain those modules, but they aren't part
of FC or FE so it's in fact not clear whether they would be ready to be
picked up when the kernels are released. Usually the nvidia kernel
modules at Livna take a day or so to appear.
I need to rebuild the initrd for my laptop kernel, so I usually install
updated kernels by hand. I wish they'd fix that, but that's another
thread.
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
