I'm somewhat new to Linux, so for practice, I want to compile a kernel from scratch. I've done it before, but I did not put much thought into it and I did not know much about the options I was selecting.

First, do I even need an initrd? When I installed Debian it installed the 2.6.8.2 kernel, along with an initrd.

If I don't use an initrd, can I leave the following options as modules, or do I need to compile them into the kernel?

CONFIG_IDE
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDISK
CONFIG_IDE_GENERIC
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE
CONFIG_NTFS_FS (will I lose NTFS read support, or will the module load when I try to mount ntfs?)
CONFIG_ISO9660_FS (will I lose CDROM read support?)

In the 2.6.8.2 config file, all of these options are set to be compiled as modules.

Nope not necessarily, I mostly don't use one on the kernels that I compile myself, but I tend to compile your list into the kernel and not as modules.

I agree w/ reddazz in that those should be compiled into the kernel. But you also need to remember to compile the root filesystem of your distro into the kernel(mines ext3 on Debian Sarge)

Thanks for the help! It does make more sense to me to just compile the base modules into the kernel. No point in having an initrd. I also learned about kmod, so I'm going to make most things module when I compile.