A General Question About Kernel Levels

[noleks at lsil.com (Nick Oleksinski)]

Hi:

I've come to the point on my PC at home where I want to upgrade the
Linux kernel in the hopes it will help me get my ethernet card
recognized by the tulip driver.  There have been suggestions to the
effect that 2.2 has a problem but 2.4 has worked pretty well.  So be it-
that's what upgrades are for!

Now the question I wanted to throw out there is this: how do you all
feel about mixing installations?  I have SuSE 6.3 installed right now
which makes my kernel 2.2.13 or 2.2.14 (can't remember offhand).  I was
thinking of moving up to SuSE 7.0 but I think it may still be kernel
2.2.x; I can't find that info on their website.  RedHat version 7 is
currently only 2.2.16.

So right now it looks like at least a couple of the big name
installations are 2.2.x.  My PC doesn't have anything vital on it right
now so I could try to install a 2.4 kernel and modules in the existing
environment.  Any thoughts?  Are kernels in a major revision (eg 2.4 vs.
2.2) supposed to be backward compatible with older versions?  How about
X11?  Right now I want to do the minimum that will get my ethernet card
recognized and then I can work on upgrading other parts of the system
using my DSL connection.  (By the way, I've been very satisfied in my
first month with Galaxy DSL, albeit on Win 98.)

I'm not looking for guarantees, just a feel for what the history of
Linux has shown in terms of updates.

Best Regards,
Nick Oleksinski
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