[ale] Foolish Distro ID Question

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 21:39 -0500, Paul Cartwright wrote:

> On Friday 02 March 2007 04:14:33 pm Greg Freemyer wrote:
> > If you want a new (much less tested) kernel you can get the SUSE KOTD
> > (kernel of the day).
> >
> > http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/kernel/kotd/i386/HEAD/
> I'd love to learn more about doing kernel makes & installs, but the 
> documentation was geared toward installing a source RPM, which there doesn't 
> seem to be one:


It seems like every distribution has their own "preferred" method for
doing kernel builds.  One of the things that I loved when I was running
my Slackware system was that building a kernel was simple, and
installing it was straightforward.  I am sure that other places like to
use non-vanilla kernels just to make life harder.  :-)

That having been said, the hardest part of building and installing the
kernel is the configuration.  I like to eliminate all of the cruft in my
kernel, trimming the size of the modules directory and hopefully getting
a few new CPU cycles along with it.  So far, I have been pretty
successful in doing that, though on more than one occasion I have built
kernels that have missed a driver or two.  :-P

I am also not a very big fan of extras, things like memory disks and
initrd and all of that.  I like having kernels that boot and work
without any extra help.  Though, comparing the kernel builds to the way
they used to be back in the 2.0 series, I am beginning to think that a
?kernel system might not be a bad thing.  It would at least get rid of
the requirement to figure out what you're doing when you build the
kernel, enable the kernel to be built differently (multiboot probably
wouldn't hurt things...), and distributors would be able to have
different drivers available in different packages, instead of just
kernel + modules packages.  (Not to mention, it would probably make
driver development easier...), but that's enough on that topic... don't
want to start a holy war.  :-)

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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