[Wolves] Kernel from another distribution

[James Turner]

On Thursday 15 May 2003 7:59 pm, Sales wrote:
> I'm running RH 8 and trying to get my sound card working (an Aurial
> 8810) and have found a rpm from sourceforge, this has said I need
> Kernel-up = 2.2.25-12.

I'd guess that the "up" stands for uni-processor (in contrast to "smp" - 
symmetric multi-processor). In any case, the RPM reports that it requires a 
kernel from the older 2.2 development branch rather than the current 2.4 
branch (R.H. 8.0 uses kernel 2.4.18 by default).

> So I found a rpm that supplies kernel-up - it seems actaully  to be a
> kernel and it is from something called the 'PLD Linux distribution'

The web site (www.pld.org.pl) quotes PLD as standing for PLD Linux 
Distribution (one of those annoying recursive abbreviations), though the P 
might also refer to Poland or Polish - it's "made mainly in Poland and by 
Poles".

> Is it ok to intall this kernel, and will it make any diff to the
> existing set up?

As a kernel from the older development branch, several newer features may not 
be available to you. Of particular note, I suspect that the ext3 filesystem 
and DRI (3D acceleration) may not be included. If you want to give it a go 
and see how things turn out, you could set up GRUB to offer a menu of both 
this and the standard kernel on boot-up, so that there's a way back should 
things go a bit wrong.

As you've probably found for yourself, an Open Source Aureal driver can be 
obtained from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/aureal/

Unfortunately, I note that the last released version is listed as being on 
January 2001, which isn't particularly encouraging. Your best bet might well 
be to try and compile the driver for your kernel, though glancing at the bugs 
and feature requests sections it would appear that there may be glitches when 
compiling under RH 8 or 9 due to the newer compiler (GCC 3).

Best of luck with it!

James