Hello all,

Okay here is my problem. It would seem the drivers for a piece of hardware i have hooked up to the system is only available for kernel version 2.6.5-7.244 however my current kernel version is 2.6.5-7.282-smp.

Now this system was handed down to me so I have no idea how it go to that kernel level or it was done through YAST's kernel updater or what. Any previous version of the kernel shows only .282 versions. I can't seem to find any .244 kernel versions so I don't know if it was ever compiled or if it was it was blown away or something.

Since i can't seem to find any drivers for this device for the .282 kernel it would seem i need to be able to boot this system in a .244 kernel. So my question is how would i create a new 2.6.5-7.244 kernel and put it in my grub configuration as a 2nd bootup option incase i ever have to go back to the .282 kernel.

Also the device i am trying to hook up to the system is a IBMtape drive 3580 and i could only find drivers for kernels .244 and lower. So if anyone knows a magical site where IBM is hiding other kernel versions that would work to.

Any advice on this would be greatly appricated.

Ohh i'm also running SUSE(i586) 9 Enterprise edition if that helps any.

Perhaps you could upgrade the kernel to 2.6.16.21-0.8 and install the version in the SLE-10 folder.
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/storage/d...SLES10/Latest/

I am surprised that IBM doesn't supply the source code for the driver so that you can compile a version for your kernel.

Thanks for finding those drivers it leaves a possible option. However i don't have version 10 and not sure how much it would effect upgrading to 10. Can the kernel be upgrade to that newest one in sles 9?

That is what I was thinking. If it doesn't work, you can simply boot up with your 2.6.5-7.282-smp kernel. Both should be listed in the grub menu. There will be both kernel module directory trees present. You may need to update or recompile other drivers after changing to a different kernel. For example, after a security update, I cd to /usr/src/packages/SPECS/ and run "sudo rpmbuild -ba ndiswrapper.spec" to produce two new ndiswrapper rpm files in /usr/src/packages/RPMS/x86_64/. I just need to install the kernel-module-ndiswrapper package. I will also run "tiny-nvidia-installer --update" to download, compile, and install a new nvidia.ko kernel module.

Note: install the kernel source module as well. If there is a problem it may be due to the differences in mkintrd or mod-init-tools between the two distro versions. But I'm sort of quessing here.

Make sure that the new kernel works OK for you before you consider uninstalling the old version. There really isn't a reason to do that unless you are tight for space in your /boot partition. You can edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file to determine which should be the default.