i have a quick question. i'm currently running slackware 8.0 with the 2.4.5 kernel on my system. i need to install the 2.4.17 kernel on my system in order to get some specific scripts to run. the only problem is that whenever i compile the 2.4.17 kernel, i get some weird stuff happening in X. my system works perfectly with 2.4.5.

so i'm wondering if there's a way to compile a new kernel using your old kernel's configuration. i think my problem is that i'm just missing some options when recompiling the new kernel.

thanx.

Copy the configuration file from 2.4.5 to 2.4.17. The configuration file is hidden and is called .config.

When I first install red hat (in my case 7.1), everything runs fine:
It recognizes my NICs, sound devices, all startup items all [passed].

However, when I do an make xconfig or menuconfig, it doesn't reflect any of the supports for my system. So, oddly enough, if I attempt to save the configuration WITHOUT making a single change, and compile the kernel....my NICs [fails] at startup, my sound device is not recognized, along with other things failing.

These things shouldn't fail because I didn't make any changes to the configuration, yet they do, which leads me to believe that .config doesn't reflect what your system has when you first do a make xconfig or menuconfig.

Is this true, and if so, why is it that?

If I want to add a simple support (for example: for another NIC), I would have also have to configure the rest of the system.

Can someone make some sense out of this....or tell me that I got all this wrong.