Quoth Andre: > Hi there > > I recently moved to Lenny from Etch via dist-upgrade. Now I got two > kernel options in grub available for boot. Doesn't a dist-upgrade mean > that the old kernel is quite useless with the new system (with all its > new libraries and stuff)? If so, how do I get rid off Etch's leftovers?
No, the Kernel doesn't depend on those libraries. Evenything you need to boot a machine is in /boot and /lib/modules/`uname -r`. From then on, any init-process may get called, which will most likely depend on _a lot_ of libs, but that's fine. (Actually, you wouldn't even need /lib/modules - if it wasn't for Debian's default initrd-policy. Let's not start a flame-war over that, I don't like it, but for a distro's stock-kernel it's maybe the best solution. But it's why you'll need the kernel's modules, too, when you boot.) Just one side note: never ever upgrade to a new kernel without having an old kernel around in case something goes wrong. I've hit _stable revisions_ that, with the *same* .config, wouldn't boot my machine. And minor revisions are even more dangerous - a friend's laptop wouldn't boot with anything between .21 and .23 - but is fine with .20 and 24-rc4. Having mulitple entries in grub isn't really much of a distraction. And the kernel images don't eat a lot of memory, too. Mine is currently 1.8 MiB, /lib/modules is 12 Mib, but that's only because nvidia's such a fat-ass hog. Otherwise it would be a bout 3 MiB. So, just ignore them and you might be very happy to have an older kernel lying around in case a new one explodes on you. Aleks
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