Re: How to check if kernel sources are installed on a system?

["Brian F. G. Bidulock" <bidulock@openss7.org>]

Arjan,

On Fri, 26 May 2006, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 18:29 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 21:19 +0000, devmazumdar wrote:
> > > How does one check the existence of the kernel source RPM (or deb) on
> > > every single distribution?.
> > > 
> > > We know that rpm -qa | grep kernel-source works on Redhat, Fedora,
> > > SuSE, Mandrake and CentOS - how about other RPM based distros? How
> > > about debian based distros?. There doesn't seem to be a a single
> > > conherent naming scheme.  
> > 
> > I'd really like to see a distro-agnostic way to retrieve the kernel
> > configuration.  /proc/config.gz has existed for soem time but many
> > distros inexplicably don't enable it.
> 
> /boot/config-`uname -r`
> 

Redhat and SuSE put /boot/config- files of the same name for different
architectures (i386, i586) in the same file.  If multiple architecture
kernels of the same verion are installed, there is no guarantee that the
/boot/config-`uname -r` is not for, say, i686 instead of i386.  It takes

 rpm -q --qf "%{ARCH}" --whatprovides /boot/config-`uname -r`

complared with

 uname -m

to see if the mismatch occurs.

Debian (Woody), OTOH strips extra names of their kernels, so 3 or 4
different releases of the same upstream kernel version all install with
the same name and report `uname -r` the same.  If multiple of these
kernels and a vanilla kernel are installed, their config files will be
difficult to distinguish.  dpkg can be used (similar to above for rpm)
to test the condition.

 /boot/config-`uname -r`

works reliability only on Mandrake.

--brian

-- 
Brian F. G. Bidulock    ¦ The reasonable man adapts himself to the ¦
bidulock@openss7.org    ¦ world; the unreasonable one persists in  ¦
http://www.openss7.org/ ¦ trying  to adapt the  world  to himself. ¦
                        ¦ Therefore  all  progress  depends on the ¦
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