Compiling a kernel scares me. I've done it a few times, mostly in the day when I ran a less graphical system. But I undertook the task this evening with the hope of adding native kernel support for my Lucent winmodem. I followed each step outlined in the SuSE Administration guide but ended up with errors - so no luck. It looks to me like it might be an error in coding, but there's a conflict somewhere.
I thought reverting to older kernel source:
zcat /proc/config.gz .config
would solve my woes, but that didn't compile correctly either.
Tonight I'm going to check for new kernel updates and see if that solves the problem. Unfortunately on dialup it'll probably be all night downloading, c'est la vie.
Compiling the kernel has really peaked my curiosity because I tried the "hard" way, doing a make config (as opposed to make xconfig or make menuconfig), and I went through each and every potential driver (so many of them). There was support for some pretty neat stuff, radio cards, usb devices I wouldn't expect support for, touch screens, etc. It got me thinking about hacking kernels for specific projects (i.e. mp3 servers) It looks like it would be a good idea, especially for machines beyond the generic x86, (i.e. PIII Coppermine, AMD Athlons, etc).
And I came across a nice rpm (Redhat Package Manager) tip today while sifting through documentation
rpm -qf /path/to/file
the above command will show what package a file belongs to. For example
rpm -qf /boot/vmlinuz
shows the package belongs to the kernel packages.
Cheers
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