It's one small step for man but a giant leap for myself

I finally got into recompiling my kernel, and surprise surprise I ran into 2 questions.


Q1:
I was making a configuration with "make menuconfig" and I could save my configuration to disc. But when you start compiling your kernel how does

"make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install"

know what configuration to use? Suppose I have saved a few configurations in that directory ... what then.



Q2:
Can anybody explain the syntax of the command

"make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install"

a. before compiling there was some output "making dep not needed" or something like that
b. what's the &&
c. what is make clean?
d. I suppose bzImage is the image to write to
e. modules?
f. modules_install


Many thanks
Wannes Smet

Q1: The .config file in the base linux kernel source directory is the "active" configuration file and what it uses to define what to compile and how to compile it.

Q2: The && means AND. If you do any two commands in Linux with && in between them it will only do the 2nd one if the first one exits cleanly (much like most programming languages... if the first argument is false it knows not to bother doing the rest of the AND because it knows the answer is false). In reality, you don't need to do a make dep, make bzImage, or make modules anymore with 2.6.x kernels. The new way of doing it is simply "make && make modules_install". The first part builds everything (dependencies, modules, and images). The 2nd part installs the modules in /lib/modules/<kernel-version>. Again, because of the && the make modules_install part won't be run if the first make command exits with an error. make clean destroys all object files left over from the last compile.. sometimes it is necessary to do this if you change certain configuration options and recompile a kernel, otherwise it is just going to make it take longer to compile.

So when you finally say ok save my config, you should leave the name .config? or not?



The reason I was compiling myself a kernel is that I want to be able to use the cpufreq module, but is there a program that can make use of this module, like Klaptop.

wannes

Yes, save your config file as .config. If you have the "userspace" mode set on cpufreq then you can use any number of programs to control it. I used cpufreqd to automatically handle mine.

Well I just noticed that a Celeron D is not supported by cpufreq.

Is there any other way to control the speed of the cpu, I really don' t like the fan WHOOOOOOO-ing all the time...


Wannes