[Techtalk] Trying to patch the kernel...

[Mary]

On Sat, May 31, 2003, Rudy L. Zijlstra wrote:
> Whereas I have no clue as to which distro you are running, and the 
> commands to get the most recent sources vary from distro to distro (also 
> I have no recent experience with RedHat, which seems to be widely used), 
> I'll limit myself to the kernel.org version.

You'll generally find that it's quite hard to apply a patch to anything
apart from the "pristine" (kernel.org) sources - the distros make quite
a lot of changes.

Sometimes a patch will only apply to a particular kernel revision too
(and I hate it when that kernel revision is something like
2.4.0-test7-pre3-ac3 or something).

However, the distro kernels are hard to patch partly because they apply
a whole lot of patches themselves - I know for example some people
who've gotten Mandrake to apply kernel patches (software suspend for
example) and now they can just install the Mandrake kernel from RPM and
run it. It can't hurt to ask (nicely, since FS/OSS hackers get lots of
very rude requests!)

-Mary