--- B Higginbottom
OK, so go back to re-compiling 2.4.22 :) In any case, the point I was making is that one should always compile their own kernel.
But why? I compile my own kernels for playing with and so that I know exactly what my system is capable of. The only time I've had to compile a kernel for a production system was to go from a late 2.2 to a 2.4 inable to get the tape drive drivers to work.
The only other reason to compile a kernel rather than used the tweaked ones a commercial distro comes with is to optimise the system, however Suse provide optimised (to processor) kernels through yast and on the install disks.
Yes, you're right there. However, the point about stock kernels is that they are compiled with *everything* in them, so that they support all hardware types, etc, so that installation is not a problem on the older architectures. By compiling your own kernel, you customise it completely to your own computer's hardware, thus removing all the unnecessary components from the kernel, thus increasing the speed as well (less things to load, if they've been statically compiled in).
By rolling your own you immediately loose any install support and more than likely would have caused more problems than it solved for the question that was asked.
No, not true. You compile your own kernel *after* installation.
See the Changelog file, there's a lot more.
I'm sure but the -mm kernel became available and was playing with that.
One can have multiple kernel's on their system, so you won't need to worry about installing Linux again.
But you have to change your system map file and you can quite easily screw up all the modules, hence the reason its only recommended for advanced users. Then you have to edit your bootloader config (hardly difficult I grant you) reboot and hope that the new kernel mounts the right file system on the right partition and so on.
I think you're missing the point. Assuming that one is using LILO (or GRUB), then this is not a problem because you can have multiple stanzas in say, /etc/lilo.conf, thus meaning that you DON'T need to mess around with the system.map file. Try it, I assure it is quite simple. How do you think developers test multiple kernels?
OK, I shall do. Thank you for being that to my attention.
I'm sure he'll be delighted to hear that running dev kernels on production systems is a good thing :)
Done -- a discussion is now in progress. -- Thomas Adam ===== Thomas Adam "The Linux Weekend Mechanic" -- www.linuxgazette.com ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk