Time for a kernel upgrade

The time has come to upgrade my kernel from what it is now (2.6.5) to the latest version (2.6.8). Since no one else logs into my machine I am not the slightest bit concerned about the vulnerability that was reported sometime ago with older kernels (I have forgotten the link, but a logged in user can crash your computer).

My real concern is that the machine appears somewhat unstable. During the past two weeks it has restarted for no apparent reason. Initially I suspected the newly installed RAM to be the culprit, it was and it wasn't. The stick had not been placed very tightly so it probably was the culprit on a couple of occaisions, but it was removed and plugged in again with much more care and now the RAM would be aggrieved if I blamed the crashes on it.

Part of the problem could be my botched gnome upgrade attempt it has without doubt lead to quite a few compatibility issues but that shouldn't cause the desktop to freeze up when I try to set up a PPP connection over GPRS.

Curiosly once when an involuntary restart happened the start up scripts refused to go past the fsck stage. It would check half a partition and then restart. I managed to overcome this by booting into my java desktop installation and running fsck from there. I can't rule out the possibility of some important libraries or binaries being corrupted. I did lose my daemontools and qmail installations because of a restart that left some dangling inodes.

All this points to the fact that something is not right and the easy way out is try to recompile the kernel let's see how it goes.