kernel compile summary

[Tim Wilson <wilson@chemsun.chem.umn.edu>]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd let you know that I have a working kernel again. Also, I
thought some of you may benefit from what I've learned over the last day
or so. Advanced Linux gurus may hit "d" now. :-)

I had some good advice from several list members. Here's a summary of
what happened.

RedHat 5.1 ships with a modified 2.0.34 kernel. It seems that the stock
RH installation has some problems with modules and recompiling the
kernel. My sound is still not quite 100%, and I attribute the problem to
the modprobe part of the system that helps load modules. I can play CDs,
but the volume functions on asmixer, my dockable mixer app, don't do
anything. Luckily the volume level is just about right now, so it
doesn't bother me for the moment.

First recommendation:  Anyone using RH5.1 should download the latest
stable kernel source from one of the kernel ftp sites and start with
that. Don't try to recompile the stock RH5.1 kernel.

Scot Jenkins provided some advice that I can't believe I missed. Even
though I couldn't mount my FAT32 windows drive as a vfat partition
(because of the problem with the vfat module), I could use 'mount -t
msdos ...' I booted into Win95, downloaded the new kernel, changed the
name to something that would fit the 8.3 msdos limitation, rebooted to
Linux, mounted the partition as msdos, copied the file over, and changed
the name back to what it was before. Very simple. It never occurred to
me.

The 2.0.35 kernel compiled cleanly. Next, following Christopher's advice
that I should have followed from the beginning, I backed up the old
kernel image before copying the new image to /boot/vmlinuz. I edited the
/etc/lilo.config file and added an entry to allow booting the old kernel
in the event of a problem popping up with the new one. I hadn't done
this before because I didn't want to go to the trouble. Of course, "the
trouble" amounted to about 1 min. of extra work. Let's just say I won't
make that mistake again.

I'd like to thank those of you who offered suggestions on this. I
appreciate the time and effort you gave. I hope someday to be able to
offer good advice to someone else with less experience that I.

See you tomorrow.

Hanging loose as usual,
Tim

-- 
Timothy Wilson		 |  Powered by Linux  |      Check out:
Henry Sibley High School |                    | http://www.redhat.org
West St. Paul, MN  USA	 |  Proud Linux user  | http://www.linux.org
wilson@chem.umn.edu	 |    since 2.0.32    | http://www.gnu.org