> Terry and others, I am running kernel 2.1.9 and it is stable. I have
> worked with ftape and it works for small backups, but a total seemed to fail...
2.1.* isn't 'stable' in any sense other than 'It might work for you'
> Why do I get the feeling that I'm getting into this stuff at just
> the wrong time?
You should acquaint yourself with the methodology behind the Linux
version
numbering scheme.
There are three digits, the first digit signifies the major version
number.
2 means Linux kernel version two.
The second digit is the minor version numbering. This one is important.
If the second digit is even ie 0,2,4,6,8 then that kernel is production
release software. That means it has been thorougly tested and has all
of the obvious bugs removed from it. The current production kernel
is 2.0.26.
If the second digit is odd, ie 1,3,5,7,9 then that kernel is ALPHA
software. It is developmental, has new features, but hasn't been
extensively tested, could change completely tommorrow and could easily
break in a big way at any time in any manner. The ALPHA kernels are
where the bleeding edge development work is done. There are two
overlapping
classes of people that should be using this code: Those who want to test
and experiment with the latest features and those who are actually
actively assisting in the software development.
The third digit is just a sequence number that allows different releases
to be made possible.
What this means in short is this: If you want stable, reliable kernel
software to use in a situation where you don't want to be chasing
possible
kernel bugs then you should use the latest version of the kernel with
the
even second digit. In this case 2.0.26. If you want the abolutely latest
features, or want to help with development by detecting, reporting
and/or
correcting bugs then you should use the latest version of the kernel
with
an odd second digit, at the moment this is 2.1.13.
If you choose to use ALPHA software you should _expect_ bugs, especially
until the third digit gets somewhat closer to the 30 or 40 mark. The 1.3
series kernels got to 1.3.100 as I recall.
Terry