Can't patch my 2.4.14 KERNEL!

[Miguel Maria Godinho de Matos]

Hi guys, i was following your advice about patching the 2.4.14 kernel to 
obtain the ext3 support though i am not being able to do so!!!!

i have the 2.4.14 kernel tree i downloaded from www.kernel.org site in my 
/usr/src/kernel-2.4.14

and i have the  patch-2.4.15-pre9.gz patch in the /usr/src  ( as it is 
recomended in the kernel how to.

i have done the following command:

#zcat  patch-2.4.15-pre9.gz | patch -p0 ( as the example of the how to 
displays!!!! )

and was then presented with the following error:
"
Perhaps you used the wrong -p or --strip option?
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|diff -u --recursive --new-file v2.4.14/linux/CREDITS linux/CREDITS
|--- v2.4.14/linux/CREDITS      Mon Nov  5 15:55:25 2001
|+++ linux/CREDITS      Sun Nov 11 10:09:32 2001
--------------------------
File to patch: /usr/src/linux-2.4.14
patch: **** File /usr/src/linux-2.4.14 is not a regular file -- can't patch"

i would lioke to know ho to apply the pacth!!!! so i can then compile  a 
kernel which supports ext3.

By the way when is the linux kernel 2.4.15 comming out???

Can u guys recomend me some good books about linux programing and stuff??

well, that's all for now. tks, AStinus