pretty much any distro will not have utilities up to date with 2.4 kernel, which is why theres a reason for the Documentation/Changes file which tells you what minimum versions to have before installing the new kernel, so saying not to upgrade 6.2 for that reason is kind of odd. most of the updated tools are already in rpm format and maybe one requires you to build from source, but its not that hard even for newbies. i've had experience running redhat 6.2 and using the patches and the new kernel. the drivers for the via apollo in the new kernel have allowed both my harddrives to operate at ata 66 as opposed to the patch only working when i had one harddrive installed. i've used 2.2.14, 2.2.16, 2.4.1, and 2.4.2 under redhat 6.2 and with the ide patch you're going to have to recompile the kernel so you might as well just download 2.4.2 and just install that.