Hi,

This problem is driving me crazy, so hopefully some one will be able to help me out. I've compiled many kernels before with no problem on my other machines, but can't seem to get one working on my new laptop.

I bought a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop and installed Red Hat 9 on it without any problem. Pretty much everything work straight out of the box, but I wanted to compile my own kernel to get a few more features working.

Red Hat installed the 2.4.21 kernel without any problem and like I said everything pretty much works. Since then I've tried to update the kernel to 2.4.27, 2.4.29, and now 2.4.31. Everytime I run into the same problem with x-windows no matter what options I select. x-windows will start up fine (I've tried several different windows managers) but the only program I can open is xterm. If I try to open up anything else I get a segmentation fault.

I don't know if this is related, but I also have a small problem with grub. My grub.conf files looks like

default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS (2.4.21-4.EL)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.21-4.EL ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.4.21-4.EL.img
title Linux-2.4.31
root (hd0,1)
kernel /bzImage-2.4.31 ro root=/dev/hda3
initrd /initrd-2.4.31.img
title DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS is the one Redhat installed that works fine. Linux-2.4.31 is the one I'm trying to upgrade too. If I set root=LABEL=/ for Linux-2.4.31 I get a kernel panic. If I set root=/dev/hda3 things work fine, excpet for the problem with x-windows above.

Thanks
Kathy

this is a very hard one without alot of information
try looking in the stock redhat kernel source directory
there are some config files that are the stock redhat config files there in a directory called
configs
copy the correct one to the top of your new kernel source directory and name it .config
then run make xconfig or however you do it
that way you start off with proper config and can tweak from there

it's a good way to learn