hello all, i plan on trimming down my linux system because it's too slow. i plan on installing a basic version of redhat 7.3 (without any on CD applications such as gnome), and then getting the xwindow, gnome2.0 and all other programs that i use in tarball form and installing them like that.

1. *does anyone have any tips to make this project flow seamlessly?

2. *my system uses a custom kernel for my athlon mo bo, how can i copy the files to have my custom kernel boot on my refined system. (i'd prefer not to recompile my kernel again and espesially not from the command line)

3. *should i have the custom kernel installed before using the ./configure commands and such with the tarballs?

You just need to copy the kernel itself (usually ´/boot/bzImage´)
to the /boot dir of your new system and configure it in lilo.

1. I doubt your project is going to go seamlessly. Compiling a bunch of applications from source can get quite tricky at times. Especially if you want to base it on a redhat system. Redhat likes to have weird locations for things and often has added it's own patches to things like compilers to make it work. These kind of difference always get you into trouble.
Whenever I want to compile applications I always go to http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints
Even though you don't have an LFS system there are usually things added in there that can be usefull for compiling on any distribution. Since you want to recompile most things anyway. Maybe it might be worth taking the consideration of going LFS all the way. It really helps to learn your system in and out and teaches you what each component does. Knowing that is very usefull for speeding up your system and illiminating stuff you don't need.

2. Just copy it like da Perp said

3. Doesn't matter which kernel you are running when you compile the programs. It should have the kernel headers which where used to compile glibc and the other programs in a different location. So if it uses any kernel headers then it should just get those.

im looking into the LFS thing but on the site http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml it is not made clear if the old distribution will be removed during the installation. The documentation says to install the lfs system on an existing linux system. do i subdivide my existing linux partition and then install linux on that or do i install lfs over the redhat-linux partition i already have -hope this was coherent

what i did to get LFS to work was to boot up off fat32 and used that drive to compile and make LFS, I then installed it on the linux partition

i dont have fat32, ntfs and ext2

Just one of the reasons I use Slackware. It seems to be faster out-of-the-box, and installing "pristine" tarballs go a lot easier too.

Still, what you are proposing is fairly drastic. What about your RH system seems slow? Are your hard drive parameters optimized? Is the kernel optimized for your motherboard? Are you running a lot of services (daemons & such) that you are not using? Have you got enough RAM? Do you have swap space properly configured?

If you recompile the kernel (which is fairly easy to do once you know how) you will get the system to boot much faster, take a smaller memory footprint, and perhaps better support your hardware.