Linux on Sony Vaio - Upgrading to a 2.4 kernel and ext3

Upgrading to a 2.4 kernel

In dselect, install kernel-image-2.4.18-686. This will drag in all of the other required packages for a 2.4 kernel. It’ll suggest kernel-pcmcia-modules-2.4.18-686 as well. You might as well select this as well.

Let dselect install all of the selected packages. This shouldn’t take too long. While configuring the new kernel image, it’ll complain about a initrd=/initrd.img line in your /etc/lilo.conf. Read the instructions carefully and do what it says. When you’ve hacked on /etc/lilo.conf and /etc/kernel-img.conf, answer ‘n’ to the question; you don’t want to stop.

Reboot

Quit from dselect and reboot. exec shutdown -r now

When it comes back up, you should be running a 2.4 kernel. Log in as root and run uname -a to check.

Upgrading to ext3

There’s nothing to it:

# tune2fs -j /dev/hda2

Having done this, edit /etc/fstab so that it reads auto, rather than ext2.

# touch /forcefsck
# exec shutdown -r now

The last two steps are to trigger fsck at the next reboot (to fix up the .journal file), and to reboot. When it’s finished rebooting, log in as root and cat /proc/mounts to check that your root filesystem was correctly mounted as ext3.