I'm doing a fresh install of debian 3.1r0 on a server of mine. Its a dual PIII 450 machine. I have scoured the net with little luck, is there a boot option during the boot: to enable the 2.6 kernel with SMP support during the install. I really don't want to recompile the kernel after the install is finished.

Thanks in advance.

I don't know how, but i strongly suggest you to compile kernel manually, especially because of the new options "Preemption Model" and "Timer Frequency", which make your kernel server side or desktop side.

OK, if this is the case which is which? Preemption Model = server side and timer frequency = desktop side? Also what exactly are those two options? I've been working with linux for a long while now, but unfortunately have not had to do a lot with the kernel as far as drivers and such. Most prebuilt kernels have always worked for me. I'm venturing into the kernel realm because I know it is a must for any Linux user.

Timer frequency: 1000Hz, 250Hz or 100Hz

Allows the configuration of the timer frequency. It is customary
to have the timer interrupt run at 1000 HZ but 100 HZ may be more
beneficial for servers and NUMA systems that do not need to have
a fast response for user interaction and that may experience bus
contention and cacheline bounces as a result of timer interrupts.
Note that the timer interrupt occurs on each processor in an SMP
environment leading to NR_CPUS * HZ number of timer interrupts
per second.

Preemption Model: 3 choices too:

1-No Forced Preemption (Server) (PREEMPT_NONE)
This is the traditional Linux preemption model, geared towards
throughput. It will still provide good latencies most of the
time, but there are no guarantees and occasional longer delays
are possible.
Select this option if you are building a kernel for a server or
scientific/computation system, or if you want to maximize the
raw processing power of the kernel, irrespective of scheduling
latencies.

2-Voluntary Kernel Preemption (Desktop) (PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY)
This option reduces the latency of the kernel by adding more
"explicit preemption points" to the kernel code. These new
preemption points have been selected to reduce the maximum
latency of rescheduling, providing faster application reactions,
at the cost of slighly lower throughput.
This allows reaction to interactive events by allowing a
low priority process to voluntarily preempt itself even if it
is in kernel mode executing a system call. This allows
applications to run more 'smoothly' even when the system is
under load.
Select this if you are building a kernel for a desktop system.

3-Preemptible Kernel (Low-Latency Desktop) (PREEMPT)
This option reduces the latency of the kernel by making
all kernel code (that is not executing in a critical section)
preemptible. This allows reaction to interactive events by
permitting a low priority process to be preempted involuntarily
even if it is in kernel mode executing a system call and would
otherwise not be about to reach a natural preemption point.
This allows applications to run more 'smoothly' even when the
system is under load, at the cost of slighly lower throughput
and a slight runtime overhead to kernel code.
Select this if you are building a kernel for a desktop or
embedded system with latency requirements in the milliseconds
range.

OK I get you now...thanks for the detailed post.