On Monday 01 October 2001 00.27, Curtis Rey wrote:

Ok, I have a question. Things work a bit different with SuSE k-compile/installs and I have never gotten it quit right. So, I'll run a list of what I think I should do and please give corrections and/or suggestions. I especially get frustrated when I run lsmod and see only two or three mods listed. So here it is:

make config/menuconfig/xconfig(xconfig this one I'm not sure about with SuSE)

Why not? It often simplifies things if you precede this with 'make cloneconfig'. That way, you have all the settings of a working system, and can just make alterations.

make

This is the same as make Image. It will compile an uncompressed version of the kernel. Sometimes this is too big to fit in the initial memory (it has something to do with the classical intel 640 kb limit, I believe, but I'm not sure). If you hit that limit, you can do make bzImage. This will produce sort of like a self extracting archive version of the kernel (this is the "uncompressing kernel" you see at bootup.). An alternative to this is make bzlilo, which will make bzImage, copy the image to /boot and run lilo. If you choose one of the first approaches, you would have to copy the kernel manually, and run lilo etc.

make modules make modules_install

Yep.

Now, this is where I'm not sure. should I make make install? make bzimage? Then cp the image to the boot dir?

See above.

What exactly do I do

then to I mk_initrd

Only if you have any modules you need loaded at boot time, such as if you have reiserfs as a module, and / is reiser, or / is on scsi, or similarly important stuff.

Do I need to have a back up copy of the module.conf?, or anything else?

If you change a service from module to compiled-in, you'd want to alter the entry in modules.conf to off (or vice versa). If you alter things, it's always a good idea to keep the old around in case the new stuff doesn't work. Also, it's usually a good idea when you compile a new kernel not to overwrite the old kernel straight away. move it to vmlinuz.oldtriedandtrue and the new kernel to vmlinuz.daredevil. That way you'll always have a safe way to boot into your system (although expect weird errors, if you alter modules.conf in the process).

If someone could run down a list of exactly what to do I would be very grateful.

*exactly* what to do depends very much on what you're trying to achieve. A book could be written on all the various things that could be done, and what to do when/if it fails. For all I know there probably has been.

TIA, Curtis

HTH Anders