CentOS/RHEL5 does not detect some onboard network cards +Videos

CentOS's kernel is a very old kernel comparing to many other distributions. The reason is stability but some times it gets annoying.

For example today i wanted to upgrade CentOS 5.2 server at work to 5.3. to make this process as trouble free as possible i cloned the server into another computer but once it booted , i noticed that it doesn't detect new computer's on-board network card! and it was almost impossible to do the upgrade without Internet.

I tried to install its RHEL5 compatible drivers but non worked. so i decided to download and install the latest Linux kernel which was 2.6.31.3. New kernel can detect this device out of the box which was exactly what i wanted. I did it and it worked perfectly well :).

Here is the script i wrote for compiling the kernel :

cd /usr/src
wget -c http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.30.1.tar.bz2
tar xvfj linux-2.6.30.1.tar.bz2
cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.3.1
make clean && make mrproper
make xconfig
make clean
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
make install
/sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.30.1.img 2.6.30

Video of the compiling process is attached, quality is very low however!