[ALUG] Upgrading kernels - what do others do?

[cl at isbd.net]

I have just tried to upgrade my kernel from 2.6.18 to 2.6.18.1, this
raises a number of problems/issues and I was wondering how other
people deal with them.

  When you run the vmware upgrade to build vmware for the new kernel
  it complains that the running kernel (2.6.18) is not the same as one
  you're trying to upgrade to (2.6.18.1) - not surprising really!
  However it means you have to build the new kernel succesfully
  before you can upgrade vmware to it, which is a bit sort of messy at
  least.


  Building one of my required added modules (the drivers for the
  RTL8168 network on the MB) it creates the new module in
  /lib/modules/2.6.18/kernel/drivers/net because it uses 'uname -r' to
  get the kernel version.  This doesn't work very well when you
  reboot - no network.


What's the right/best way to patch the kernel to minimise these
problems?  I created /usr/src/linux-2.6.18.1 as a copy of
/usr/src/linux-2.6.18 and applied the 2.6.18.1 patches to the new
directory tree.  It would seem (in view of the above problems) that
this may not be the ideal way to do it.  I've now changed names so
that I have /usr/src/linux-2.6.18.base (as the original version) and
/usr/src/linux-2.6.18 which is the patched version but then it's a bit
more difficult to keep track of which version you patched to.

-- 
Chris Green (chris at halon.org.uk)