Just a few questions, as I'm recompiling a kernel and trying to slim down my install somewhat to back up for other machines.

First, if I upgrade to the 2.6.10 kernel and have udev installed, am I correct in assuming that I can remove the dev package?

Second, if I enable all the ALSA features in the kernel, what additional packages will I need to have for sound?

Thanks in advance!

If you enable all of the correct features of ALSA in the kernel, then technically, anything that uses ALSA should work properly. However, I had great difficulty getting non-ALSA-based programs (read: anything using SDL) to work at all. I ended up removing everything except basic sound support (the 'soundcore' module) from the kernel and then compiling ALSA from source. This seemed to offer a more consistent result for me.

If you do end up compiling ALSA into your kernel, you might want to consider removing any of the installed ALSA packages as you might end up with conflicts.

If you are talking about the kernel config option for devfs you SHOULD NOT use it. If you are talking about the devs-2.x.x-noarch-x package installed with Slackware then you SHOULD NOT remove it either as it is required for the 2.4.xx kernels. Unless I'm out of my reckonin', that is what populates the /dev directory when you boot to a 2.4.xx kernel. Udev will live side-by-side with it and won't cause any problems as devs isn't used with a 2.6.x kernel and udev ain't used with a 2.4.xx kernel.

As far as alsa goes, I've always had the best luck compiling it as a module, rather than compiling it into the kernel. That way if something ain't right I can do "lsmod" and see the loaded modules. If you compile it into the kernel they won't show up (as they ain't modules). The main thing is to select which driver(s) you need and, again, have them compiled as modules. However, leave OSS deselected. It is depreciated and alsa actually has an oss compatibility library (alsa-oss) that you can download and compile from source for those programs that still depend on OSS stuff, namely any programs that require /dev/dsp and such. All of the main alsa library files are installed with Slack (alsa-lib, alsa-utils and alsa-oss) and I think that, even with Slack 10.0, it is alsa 1.0.8 (but I can't remember right now). After you recompile the kernel and boot to it you may want to download the alsa-driver-1.0.8 file from The ALSA Project and compile it according to the howto (also to be found on their site) for your card/chipset.

HTH,
MMYoung