Gurus, about that kernel...
 

Gurus, this is one for you. What am I to do? I want to use the latest kernel, I've carefully studied the options when configuring it, I've checked and updated the dependancies, checked for errors when building it and it's modules, got none, installed it, and it still won't boot... The screen goes black after lilo has asked me to choose kernel to boot, and that is just sooo irritating. I cannot possibly suck so much that I fail six times in a row while following every imaginable tutorial and how-to there is on this subject. There has got to be some little option or configuration in the system I've overlooked.

Help, plz...

Okay, I just realized something.... I have no rc.sysinit file what so ever... Is that file system specific (created automatically) or can I just use the contence of another linux box's rc.sysinit?

This is probably just a framebuffer setting :)
After the screen goes black, do you see activity on the hard drive?

What framebuffer driver did you compile in? (if any)

--Shade

Can't remember if I did that ()after six times you know...). How do I check?

Can't find anything on creating a new rc.sysinit. Strange though, it's a fresh install of Slack 9.1.How do I create one?

There is no rc.sysinit. Perhaps you mean rc.sysvinit?

Slackware uses BSD style init scripts, so rc.sysvinit isn't required. Though it should still be there from a clean install.

Did you run lilo after you copied the kernel and system.map to /boot?

Ah, didn't know that. there was no rc.sysinit in slack. Yes, I did run lilo after copying the kernel and System.map to boot. And I did make appropriate changes to the lilo.conf.

Does any of this apply to me? The guy uses redhat, yes, but do I need to make similar changes in slack?

Slackware 9.1 is "2.6 ready" so you can just plug in a 2.6 kernel and it will work, without upgrade module-init-tools and the like. I have compiled several 2.6 kernels for Slack 9.1 and just dropped 'em in and everything was fine. As someone else said, your issue is probably with the framebuffer. Go into your lilo.conf and see which framebuffer you have selected. Try the normal VGA framebuffer. This page might help.

Thx, the kernel will load, but it's DAMN slow. Is 1780kb big for a kernel? And oh, check out this , I ran into some, err, "minor" problems later on........................................ *many more dots*

The 2.4.26 kernel I built recently is about 1.2 MB (sadly my Slackware 9.1 box with a 2.6 kernel is still packed up as I am moving, or I would've checked it for you), so that kernel, while largeish, isn't overwhelmingly gigantic. What are the symptoms of the slowness? Is it slow in general or just doing one thing (like disk writes)? Check top to see if there's a user process or kernel thread eating lots of CPU and check vmstat to see if IO operations are slow for some reason. Without a few more details, it's going to be hard to diagnose exactly what is going on.