ISP uses modified kernel, how do I use the official kernel on CentOS?

Question

I have just rented a dedicated server from OVH which uses a custom kernel, so whenever I run a command like the following:

sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools

I get errors due to missing dependencies:

Missing Dependency: kernel >= 2.6.9-11 is needed by...

Now I've read that I can do a netboot in reinstall the OS and the official kernel, however I would rather not reinstall everything as I have set quite a lot up already.

Is it possible to run the official kernel without a reinstall?

If so how do I do go about it?

Answer 1

It looks like they provided you with a customized CentOS distro, which means it is not using standard CentOS repositories. Otherwise yum would have found the kernel. Perhaps you can try adding the official CentOS repositories and hope nothing else is customized but in this situation it might make more sense to just go the route your provider suggest to avoid unexpected issues later.

Alternatively you can install the tools you need separately (not as a group) and hope they don't have kernel-headers as a dependency :)

Or you can download the kernel RPMs manually from a CentOS repo, install them and then try installing the group again. But then if you're using kernel-headers, make sure to compile against the correct headers.