upgrade red hat 5.2

[pengwin]

i'm a real newbie and just installed an old red hat 5.2 i had in the closet and would like to upgrade to a later version that will recognize the extras i put on my computer (usb, nic card for dsl modem, etc.).
can i upgrade this package with one of the i386 rpm's from red hat ? (my present kernel is 2.0.36; i don't remember where i got this info, but i had written it in the cover of the book several months ago.)
if so, which one of the bewildering array of rpms do i choose from the rpm site ? can i jump from the 5.2 straight to 7.whatever or should i climb up through the versions? and is there one site (or a link on this board) which will take me through the steps sequentially (1,2,3... do this, do that, etc.)?
i'm running a dell p166 with 64 megs of ram,ethernet card to linksys router and dsl access; dual boot through partition magic-boot magic with win98se. the present reh hat is on a partition shared with win98. i tried to install the linux to the slave drive (3.2 gb), but for some unknown reason kept getting insufficient space. i may just format the master drive (8.2 gb) and make this a total linux machine.

plan to have some fun upgrading and learning linux on this 2nd computer.

thanks,
pen tomae@yahoo.com

[ 10 August 2001: Message edited by: pengwin ]

[Necro Lin]

If you have DSL on one of your computers then why don't you just download RH7.1? I'm not sure whether or not it will let you do a simple upgrade because of the huge difference in version. For one, 7.1 requires some rediculous amount of space for swap so you'll probably have to repartition. I had 128 megs for 7.0 & 7.1 told me that I need like 500 megs or something like that.

My suggestion is as follows:

A) dowload RedHat 7.1
B) burn it on some cd's
C) boot your computer from the cd & try to upgrade. If the upgrade does not work just do a new install with just 7.1. It's a really good system & I think that you'll enjoy it.

Another thing about this system is that it's got some nice hardware support so you should have no problems with hardware recogition & setup. ;)

[posterboy]

This thing I am using started as RH5.2 and always smoothly upgraded until I got to 7.0 and there it ended. I am still on 6.2 as a result, although I have a lot of updated stuff, kernel, and all that. It's changed so much, it's likely the easiest, and best path is through a clean install of a late model distro. I wish I had that option. :) Ray

[pengwin]

i think i'll try downloading the full distro and attack from that angle. the new dell has a burner; that would have to be easier than upgrading.

thanks guys,

pen