i'm recompiling my kernel and trying to refine things a little bit, and there are a few options that i dont understand and the built in help isn't enough.

1. the helps says that a "pentium or higher" processor is required for this, but then it says that it ignores non-mce processors like 386 and 486, so i dunno if my processor would be able to use this or not and i'm lost on how to find out.

2. how do i know if my processor uses APIC, is there any way to check? if i'm not using this, i'd rather not compile it in and increase my kernel size

these options are for pentium 4 processors, but i'm not sure if my processor uses them anyway, how can i find out?

it says that if your processor doesnt have a math coprocessor, you need this feature. how do i find out if i've got a math coprocessor?

my processor is a pentium m centrino, btw. doesn't intel bother to post this stuff on their site somewhere? i couldn't find it.

do i need the options under this in order to doany routing at all? the help said to enable this if you're planning on doing mostly routing with your computer, but what if i just want to do a little routing once in a while, do i still need this?

do i need this enabled just to use my wireless card at all or is bluetooth something separate from regular wifi?

i've turned the console display stuff on and set my logo in the logo configuration to the standard 224 bit tux(is it a problem to select all three logos?). will setting up console display driver and framebuffer options allow me to view images from the console, set console background images, etc.?

Since you have a modern laptop, I would assume it has full APIC support.

BlueTooth is not the same as WiFi, you don't need it.

You should only have a single logo selected, not all 3.

Every CPU (that I know of, anyway) since the 80386 has had a math coprocessor.

The rest, I would say you are being over-critical. You are talking about adding a few hundred bytes to your kernel, at most, to add things like "Machine Check Exception".

what about the routing? do i need advanced route stuff or is that just some extra routing stuff that i would need if i was making a dedicated router?

the stuff about "Machine check Exception" and the "P4 thermal throttling", i'd like to find out if my processor(pentium M centrino) uses it just because i'm curious. are the pentium M's based on p4 at all or are they a totally new architecture.

also, for some reason, i've selected the options for console display, and selected one logo(the 224 bit tux logo) and i dont see it at startup.

The advanced routing won't be needed, as you assumed, unless you are doing advanced routing. Basic jobs like port forwarding and setting up a firewall don't require the Advanced Routing features.

If you aren't seeing Tux on boot-up, it could be a problem with your video driver, or the framebuffer is not enabled.

It seemed to me that when I did a make defconfig, a lot of options seemed to have "magically" selected themselves to appropriate default-values for the host-processor. But I haven't actually delved into the Makefile to see if that was actually the case.

Use /proc/cpuinfo to see what kind of processor is installed on the host machine.

What I'd suggest is that you start with the default-configuration and then tweak it as you need to. Then boot it up and try it out. I wouldn't start with "make oldconfig" because distros usually include everything but the kitchen sink.

Personally, I like to put all of the device-drivers I'll need, the IP stuff I'll need and so-on right into the kernel, instead of using modules for anything (and thus without needing an initial-ramdisk for any reason). The greatest amount of time and space is saved by stripping-out all of the device drivers that you know you don't need. The resulting kernel is "lean and mean" and loads quickly, straight from the bootloader without a ramdisk. When, and if, you actually change the hardware layout of the machine, then you simply build a new kernel appropriate to the new equipment.

well, the thing about tux is that he shows up fine with the stock kernel from slackware. i have all of my framebuffer options set up with my 2.6 kernel tho, so i dunno what's wrong. looking at the dmesg from both kernels, the stock kernel has these lines in dmesg the 2.6 kernel doesnt have that, what part of the kernel configuration do i go so that i can enable vesafb, etc.?

my dmesg shows this: what does this mean? is my processor not using apic?