[wplug] Several questions

[Jonathan Billings]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:01:05AM -0500, Weber, Lawrence A wrote:
> I have been working on the development of a product using uClinux as one
> of its embedded operation systems.  The development has been on PC's
> running Fedora 8 and 9.  My work is requiring me to understand Linux in
> more detail than before.  I have several petty questions that I would
> like to bug you with.

It's been my experience that Fedora has not handled in-place upgrades
well, that it's best to back up whatever data you want to save and do
a clean install, and restore user data.  This has been fixed in newer
versions, but I'm not certain F6 is included.

> 1.  On one of my PC's I upgraded from Fedora 6 to 9 in one step.  I
> mostly went o.k. I find that in my /usr/src/kernels directory four
> subdirectories with kernel source.  Two for fc6 and two for fc9.  Why
> are there two src directories for each version?

Are the release numbers different for the different releases of the
kernels?  Most likely you have the kernel source installed for more
than one release of the kernel, for both FC6 and F9.

> 2.  I noticed that the kernel that is running (uname -r) is not the
> highest numbered 9 kernel.  In fact it is not any of the kernels in
> /usr/src
>     2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 is listed as running
>     2.6.25-14.fc9.i586 is in src as well as 2.6.27.9-73.fc9.i586

I'm not sure why this would be the case, perhaps the running kernel is
detecting it's an i686 CPU, but the directory name reflects that the
kernel source is for i586 and higher?  This is probably just a naming convention.

> 3.  Under /usr/src there is a redhat directory tree, but there are no
> files.  What is it?

That's for building Redhat packages with rpmbuild when you're running
as root.  You probably haven't built any packages so it's empty.

> 4.  Kernel numbering:  When is a dash used in the version number?

The dash usually means there is a release number.  Redhat/Fedora uses
that number to keep track of their own releases of a particular kernel
version that they're packaging.  So 1.2.3-1 is the first release,
1.2.3-2 is the second, etc.

> 5. make xconfig will not run as it is seems to be compiling for KDE
> (kconfig) while I am running gnome.  Is there a xconfig for gnome?

I believe you can use 'make gconfig'.

> 6.  When I was running fc6, the auto updating feature would always
> report that the system was up-to-date.  I assumed that was because fc6
> was too old.  When I did an update to fc9, I found that one of the fc6
> kernel directories was changed.

I'm not sure what you mean here.  How was it changed?  Was it removed?
It's unlikely that any F9 package would do anything but remove an
older kernel-source package.

> 7. Is this list of question a sign that I should go with Red Hat
> Enterprise?

Not necessarily, unless you are unhappy with the level of support
you're getting.  Upgrading RHEL versions is going to produce the same
results as you're seeing here.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>