Between the 16th and 18th, I asked for help regarding the subject above and received considerable assistance from Brad. I did say that when my upgrade efforts were concluded I would report.
I have upgraded from 2.0.36 to 2.2.1 without appearing to cause any great disasters, and with surprising results. At present, I boot from a floppy and it now takes 36 secs to reach the log-in screen instead of 3mins 50 secs. So far as I can tell everything works very well and the speed is far greater than I need - to me it seems blindingly fast. However, I have what seems to be one potential problem, some cleaning-up to do (Ihope its only that) and a few questions to take my knowledge a little further. Firstly, when I boot, I do not get an opportunity apply any parameters - the reference to (I think) Peter Anwin and the boot prompt do not appear - the word 'loading' and a fast moving line of dots then right into the 'init' and up comes the log-in screen. (No time to pick up my coffee mug). What have I omitted? I don't know what will happen if 'rescue' is needed. After 'make config', 'make dep', and 'make clean' I used 'make bzdisk' which gave me the disk I now use for booting. The kern.log now seems basically very clean to me - the only items I do not understand are 'cannot find map file' and 'work around ISA DMA hangs' followed by 'activating ISA DMA hang work arounds' - I presume the latter two just show a correction working. I find some files confusing and am not sure what I should get rid of. /usr/src now contains kernel-source-2.2.1.tar.gz (1.3M which I put there) and a directory kernel-source-2.2.1 which includes vimlinuz (1.3M) dated Oct 25. /usr/include/linux still has Oct 5 date (my original installation). / has vmlinuz (19 Bytes) linked to /boot/vmlinuz also dated Oct 5 and /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36 is 715K again Oct 5. Does this make sense, and if so what is not needed? If there is nothing sinister arising out of the above, I propose to apply patches 2 to 7 and then on to 12. I have started to prepare for this but find a confusion in Brian Ward's Linux Kernel HOWTO. Under 5.1 'Applying a patch', after the initial steps, it says 'If everything went right, do a 'make clean', 'config', and 'dep' as described etc' Do I take it I should follow that order? Could I again ask for help, clarification and pointers, please. Regards, John.