Hello everyone,

Perhaps you will be able to help me. I have an ASRock K7VM2 Windows XL series mb and I do not use it for Windows at all. It had been working beautifully, disregarding poor video since I have a truly lousy on board vga card, but the board does not appear to have any scsi contoller. Yet, I purchased a Sony cdrw that is both IDE/SCSI and upon discovering the scsi emulation in mdk 9.2 I thought I would use it to improve the speed and such on my burner (mostly was experimenting at the time).

Now the interesting stuff! Having never compiled a kernel before I research over 50 web pages, more visits to forums than I can even count that always referred me to some of the web pages I had visited and chose the most popular references. Then I installed mdk's 2.4.22-21 source and went to work with the wonderful looking graphic (and non graphic a second time) make menuconfig. Well I won't go through all of the interesting results that it said failed (the compile ended with 3 repeated errors and said it could not finish), but I will say that I lost alsa, my cdrw is now only a cdrom, and most certainly do not have scsi emulation.

On top of those strange occurances, I am not supposed to have a compiled 2.4.22-21 kernel, which I renamed to just 2.4.22 and yet it is in the boot menu and as I said, some things that were done in the attempted compile have affected the way linux is or isn't working for me right now. ALL IS VERY ODD!!

I have 4 other precompiled kernels from mdk in my box that I understood were totally safe from what I was doing with the source, but it appears that I misread something or what I read was BS! In any case, most things are functioning with the sound since I still have oss, but I have SB Live! that is much better with alsa. I would also like to have my cdrw back, but I cannot figure how to convince the mdk config that it is one.

I am reasonably certain that my failed attempt at compiling a kernel has screwed the system, but I do not know what to do about it. Heck, I cannot even remember or find the info to tell mdk in the config for the mount and unmount of my Sony cdrw. As a last partial problem before I plead for help; I did not see anything in the compile menu in relation to an ADSL Modem. I have an ARESCOM ADSL Modem or whatever you would call it since it does not really dial in. It is more like a T1 connection that is always connected and I have 512 kbps. Well after I screwed the compile I lost my connection, but after I rebooted I got it back by working the network config 3 times.

Now the PLEAS FOR HELP!! Does anyoone know what I do in the compile menu in relation the my ADSL and does anyone know what I need to do to fix the rest? For the moment it seems that it only works if I use nothing but a precompiled kernel and do nothing else. However, if I do nothing else NOW, my sound system is not the way it should be and I will not ever have good video. At the same time, I will have a cdrw that is nothing more than a cdrom.

ALL HELP AND SUCH IS GREATLY APPRECIATED!!

How did you "rename the kernel"?

and why?

I never madde it beyond bzImage, but the following is what I tried.

1- download sources
* install the kernel sources of your distro. they will install in /usr/src/linux-version-number. You can also download a .tar.bz2 file at http://www.kernel.org. Go to /usr/src/, and extract it with "tar jxf linux-2.4.22.tar.bz2"
* create a symlink from /usr/src/linux-version-number to /usr/src/linux, for example:
ls -s /usr/src/linux-2.4.22 /usr/src/linux

configure it
* if you can find the kernel configuration of your distro (maybe at the source cd??), I'd recommend you use it! ..to be sure you don't forget anything important The file should be copied/saved as /usr/src/linux/.config

* cd /usr/src/linux
* make menuconfig
Navigate through these config menu's, read the help for every option, the help usually gives suggestions too.
Compile drivers as modules (<M> ), and other features + file systems as built-in (<*> ) You could disable features if you're sure your system doesn't support this. removing built-in features speeds up your system kernel. At the general menu, choose your processor type. (will speed up too) If you want to dive in very deep, use the "dmesg | less" command to see what the kernel has to tell you, and what your system has/uses
* open /usr/src/linux/Makefile in a text editor, and upgrade the revision number, for example "-my1". (or you might overwrite your existing kernel modules)

compile it
* type these commands:
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
make modules

install it
make modules_install
cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/linux-2.4.22-my1
cp /usr/src/linux/System.map /boot/System.map-2.4.22-my1
* create the links to System.map:
cd /boot
ln -s -f System.map-2.4.22-my1 System.map
* You may need to remove System.map first:
rm System.map
* update your boot loader.. (I'll assume it's lilo here)
edit /etc/lilo.conf, add another "image = /boot/linux-2.4.22-my1" line, etc..
* run lilo, and reboot.

* backup your .config: cp /usr/src/linux/.config /boot/config-2.4.22-my1.
* clean up compiler objects:
cd /usr/src/linux
make clean
make mrproper

I would do make distclean or make mrproper before anything else. Then I would start by doing a make oldconfig. Once you build it and install it like that you can go back and work on it some more.


make distclean
make oldconfig
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
make install


or on one line

make distclean oldconfig dep clean bzImage modules modules_install install


Be sure you keep your working kernel around and untouched. Also be sure you have a working boot floppy, and be aware that the boot floppy uses the libs in /lib/modules/? for the kernel that it was made with.

What you are saying makes a lot of sense to me, but I am still confused. First, I thought that as long as I had a precompiled kernel of a different name and such (ex: precompiled is 2.4.22-10, source is2.4.22-21) and did not try to screw with it the work I would do with the source would do absolutely nothing to the otherone. Have I misinterpreted that??

Second, in some way, what I attempted to do with the source, totally screwed my cdrw situation. I have everything else working to a fair extent, but I do not remember what I put in the mdk control center to have the cdrw seen mounted/unmounted properly. All I can get at this point is a cdrom for music. No data recognition and no burning. Can you help me with that as well?

I feel really stupid at this point, because of my screw up and especially since I seem to have forgotten everything. SUPER DUHHH!!

There should be no problem with working on one kernel without changing something on the other. Maybe the bootloader config file got changed and the ide-scsi module is not loading.

If it does not work at all maybe you need to load module ide-cd as well.

Somehow I suspect what has happened is that your modules are not loading any more.

If the modules are not loading or if some of them are not loading, how do I fix it? I hope I am not starting to look lazy, but I am actually tired of looking for info by myself and finding pieces of info instead of complete and correct info. Unless I am doing very poor research, most of the resources appear to be very poor.

On the other hand, people such as yourself here in linuxquestions.org ARE FANTASTIC. I consider this place much better than even the Mandrake Club Forum.

I also hope you will forgive my having two different threads going at this time, especially since they are slightly related to each other. I get extremely wordy though, so trying to deal with everything in one thread would require at least a web page of my own.

Anyway, I managed to receive good advice about actually making my kernel compile function. However, I still do not understand the proper way to set up the mount/unmount in mdk control center. I am now able to read data cd's but I only have "supermount, ro, sync" in the options and I seem to remember a bit more info in there before. Will the cdburner function properly as is, or do I need to put more info in the options and if so, can you tell me what to place in there?

Thanks again!

I would say the first you need to see if it is a module problem. Try loading the modules and see if that fixes it. If it does then make a file /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and add the commands there to load the modules.

RedHat will run the file if it's there, not sure if mandrake does or not. You can run the rc.modules script from your rc script.