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.