On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Nikhil Joshi wrote:
if you also upgrade the kernel you can safely assume that ur installation is comparable with RH8.0
upgrading the kernel also requires upgrading modutils, binutils, glibc, gcc and several other packages. eventually you notice that little remains of the original distro - probably vim and emacs would still work.
How do we treat the older kernels? Tear 'em down?
No, stable versions of older kernels are just that - stable. FWIW, 2.0 and 2.2 are still being maintained. You can download 2.0.39 (soon coming out with 2.0.40) and 2.2.23 (going on 24) from kernel.org.
I guess older Kernels should be replaced by (stable) newer ones The reason being they are (presumably) stabler, support more hardware and filesystems
why would you want to support newer hardware that you don't have? if the machine's hardware hasn't changed, and the kernel supported it 5 years ago, it isn't going to stop supporting it now. OTOH, there have been reports of newer kernels not fully supporting older hardware (in particular some buggy BIOSes) that older kernels did.
IMO, stick with what you have if it works for you. Apply security patches, and that's it.
Philip