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6. Happy Now ?

This list is not exhaustive, but I hope that having it, saves you a days work, or a downed machine. You should also check elsewhere for other lists of things that you need. eg SYS-V-INIT ?

Now you should be able to build a new system, and immediately upgrade it, so that you can use the new Linux-2.0 kernel.

What special goodies does that bring you? I don't know. I'm so miffed with upgrading those naff distributions that I have not had the time or energy to find out!

Basically, if you have been using 1.2.13 a lot has changed. Many more things are modules, and kerneld is rather nifty! New devices are supported, and new code may be better then old code. Userfs now expects a 1.3 or 2.0 kernel, and it is rather sweet (though the old userfs ran on 1.2 ok).

Some new devices and ideas include initrd, which is an optimised ramdisk, that can have modules loaded into it, so that you can then access the CDROM (eg SCSI module + isofs module) and boot from a CDROM. The loopback-disk is new, it converts a file to a block device, maybe with encryption. And of course the kernel is now very similar to those on other architectures.

All very nice, but why is it 2.0 and not 1.4 ?? Maybe it's a race to reach 3.1, when customers will be able to identify it as mature, and distant from 0.99. Who knows? Who cares? It's excellent!

6.1 Other places

You already know about /usr/src/Linux/Documentation/Changes, you might also want yo try


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