i am compiling the 2.6.10 kernel on slackware 10 and am having trouble getting the sound to work. how can i determine what modules and the built-in kernel stuff i need? is there a command that prints out a description if what hardware i have?

see if dmesg is on your machine and run it as
dmesg | more (or less)

the command "lspci" or "cat /proc/pci" will output a list of hardware attached to your pci bus, including your AGP bus, IDE controller and almost all the hardware in your system,

make sure you compile support for your IDE controller, and the filesystem linux is installed on into the kernel.

anything else can be compiled as a module if you like.

a good starting point will be to take a config file from the slackware kernel you were using, copy it to the kernel-2.6.10 source directory, rename it to ".config" then run "make oldconfig"

then work from there.

and remember, if there is anything you dont understand, look it up.
read the help tab on every question.
never guess an answer.
and your first attempt, and probably second attempt at compiling a kernel will fail. ive never sopken to anyone who's succeded on there first attempt. so be patient.

qwijibow,

Just out of curiosity, as I haven't dealt with slackware in many years, can't the file system be built as a module and then create an initrd for the boot process? That is usually the case in most other distros.

that is true. however...

the purpose of an initrd to to build a kernel which can boot and run on many different machines without having to compile everything todo with the ide controller, and filesystem into the kernel.

howeven when custom compiling a kernel, you are creating a kernel to run on only one machine.
if you know a certain kernel module is going to be loaded every single boot, like a filesystem driver, then you might aswell just compile it into the kernel, save time having to modprobe it.

for custom compiled kernel's there is no need for an initrd image.

so although you dont actually NEED to compile tht filesystem driver into the kernel, by doing so you will save yourself having to build an initrd image.

Good point. I do typically create the /boot partition as an ext2 filesystem since ext2 must be built into the kernel rather than a module.

Most of the time I create a custom kernel to farm out to several like machines. So I suppose it really wouldn't matter which way I did it, I do typically try to keep the kernel small and make most of it modular. That has bit me in the butt when I had some corrupted modules. I still haven't figured out how that happenned. I think a hard drive was going bad and it was where some of the modules were sitting.

I do build some small kernels as monolithic just so they are bootable off of a floppy with out the use of modules, but care had to be taken to not make it too big.

Thanks for the reply.

ok i used the commands that were recommended and everything is running well as far as i can tell, except for sound. when i run alsaconf i get:

bash-2.05b# alsaconf
modinfo: could not find module snd
modinfo: could not find module snd
modinfo: could not find module snd

it then say that there are no supported PnP or PCI cards. does this mean i am mising something in the kernel? i know i need snd-intel8x0 for sound.

bash-2.05b# locate snd-intel
/lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0m.o.gz
/lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0.o.gz
/usr/src/linux-2.6.10/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0.o
/usr/src/linux-2.6.10/sound/pci/.snd-intel8x0.o.cmd

locate says that the module is there. is alsa not looking in the right spot?

also about hotplugging. what exactly is hotplugging? i assume that it allows you to remove memory sticks, external hardrives and such while the machine is running but if none of the file systems are mounted can the device be safely removed without hotplugging enabled? when the computer boots it hangs on the hotplug start up command. how can i stop either it taking so long or stop it from loading?

nevermind the part of the last post about sound. i am a dumba$$. i just went to volume control and raised the volume settings.

Hotplugging is the automatic loading of kernel drivers.

you can remove hotplug from the bootup scripts, and use the module boot script to manualy modprobe drivers.