I've got this amd64 dell laptop. I can get a 2.6.18-k7 kernel to work. I can get a 2.6.18-amd64 and 2.6.21-amd64 kernel to work. What I'd really like is to get a 2.6.21-k7 kernel to work. In preparation I downloaded the stock kernel and did a dist-upgrade to lenny.

The kernel boots up in about 4 minutes, but you have to hold down the space bar some of the time or it will pause in the middle of the bootup sequence. I don't exactly know why this works, but it does. After the thing boots up x acts a little funny. It pauses all the time. It will continue again where it left off if you touch the mouse pad or press a key. It strikes me that this is similar to the problem at startup with the space bar.

Is there something I can do to fix this? Does this problem have to do with interrupts? If I have to compile a new kernel what changes do I make to the configuration? Maybe there's a page that talks about this? Thanks.

Are K7 kernels supposed to work with AMD64 processors? I'm not sure. Why do you want K7 over AMD64 anyway?

You cannot do some things well with AMD64, like browsing certain web sites, or like running eclipse... which is a big deal for me. 2.6.18-k7 works on my computer, but in order to get my wireless to work I need a later kernel... Can anyone help me?

This is a thread about the same thing that I started at another forum before doing a dist-upgrade. forums.debian.net

The k7 kernel is tailored to the AMD AthlonXP series proc. Your proc is a k8 core and has a different layout to the k7, potentially introducing some unexplainable errors during operation. If you really don't want the k8 kernel, use the generic 686 kernel.

Btw, I doubt that the unability to browse certain websites or run particular app's has anything to do with a proc-specific kernelconfig. I suggest you'd examine the rest of your system, perhaps some libs are missing or their higher version not recognized due to lousy programming...

I have the 2.6.21 686 kernel on the same partition. It acts just like the k7 kernel... not that there's no difference, but that the problem at boot up is the same. It pauses often and pressing any key will make it return to booting. After starting x a similar thing happens, only then you can use the mouse pad to get it to continue as well as pressing a key.

Just in case anyone else experiences this, I had some success adding the two words 'noapic nolapic' to the end of the kernel line in grub's menu.lst This allows the kernel to boot fast, and x operates normally once it is booted. The downside is that one of the two processors that normally show up when you look at 'System Monitor' is gone. I don't know how to check what the actual processing ability of the computer is after that, but I'm assuming it's lower. If anyone can tell me how to test that (obviously a very noob-ish question) I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Or when in "top" hit <1> - it'll show all the processors if you have more than one active.

Now I only have one cpu, where without the change to grub I have two. Do all programs use the second cpu? I was under the impression that most programs don't. Is that true? What about java? Anyone have ideas about these things? tia.

Programs have to be designed to be (safely) able to use more than one processor. It's probably correct to assume most aren't.
However there are generally other tasks capable of running if "extra" CPU resource were available. This usually means the running task(s) gets pre-empted. More CPUs means this happens less often, so even non multi-processor aware code benefits slightly.
(Thread-safe) multi-threaded code of course benefits the most - from the concurrency extra CPUs brings.