Trying to keep ahead of the zero-day vanilla bump requests has proven to be challenging.
To aid in that, I’ve written a small bash script that will go out and determine if a new kernel version has been released.
If it finds a new version, the script will email the defined recipients.
Some limitations do exist:
- It uses screen scraping. Hence, if the kernel.org website source changes, the script will need to be updated
- It is limited to checking only the following kernel versions:
- The latest stable version
- The latest prepatch version
- The latest snapshot version
- The latest 2.4 version
This might be useful only to me, not sure how many people live and breath for the next kernel version. 🙂
As always, suggestions, comments and patches are always welcome.
You can download version 0.1 here.
You could use the URL http://www.kernel.org/kdist/finger_banner and get the latest kernel versions from there. The format of the result is
1) plain text
2) only to change, when there is a new major version out there.
But since you can grep the output for “stable” you always get the latest stable release version. That makes it (at least for the stable branch) very easy to use in scripts.
Hope that helps.
… or use the RSS-feed.
there’s also ketchup (dev-util/ketchup)
dirtyepic@tycho ~ $ ketchup -l
2.4 (signed)
old stable kernel series
2.4-pre (signed)
old stable kernel series prereleases
2.6 (signed)
current stable kernel series
2.6-bk (signed)
old stable kernel series snapshots
2.6-ck (signed)
Con Kolivas’ patches for system responsiveness (desktop)
2.6-cks (signed)
Con Kolivas’ patches for system responsiveness (server)
2.6-git (signed)
current stable kernel series snapshots
2.6-mjb (signed)
Martin Bligh’s random collection ‘o crap
2.6-mm (signed)
Andrew Morton’s -mm development tree
2.6-pre (signed)
current stable kernel series prereleases
2.6-rc (signed)
current stable kernel series prereleases
2.6-rt (unsigned)
Ingo Molnar’s realtime-preempt kernel
2.6-tiny (signed)
Matt Mackall’s -tiny tree for small systems
2.6-tip (signed)
current stable kernel series tip
dirtyepic@tycho ~ $ ketchup -s 2.6-mm
2.6.25-rc2-mm1
There’s also
$ finger kernel@kernel.org
in the crowd of solutions 🙂 The result is the same as retrieving http://www.kernel.org/kdist/finger_banner.
How about
wget -nc http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-2.6.24.5.gz || \
wget -nc http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-2.6.25.gz