If you find yourself upgrading a wicked old Fedora distro, you may run across an error like this:

Error: Package initscripts needs kernel < 2.6.12, this is not available.

Try upgrading your kernel. To upgrade your kernel, make sure that only the latest version is hanging around. Because of a bug in legacy versions of yum, any older versions of the kernel must be removed.

To check your installed kernels, run:

$ rpm -qa | grep kernel

Note that if you simply run “rpm -q kernel”, you may miss smp kernels or other. The above will give you a complete picture. Remove all except the very latest version, then run yum update.