What modules should i have compiled? i think most of my drivers are built into the kernel. what should i have compiled as a module. all lsmod reports is my sound card, agpgart,and my video card.

root@brian:~# lsmod
Module Size Used by
fglrx 239804 7
via_agp 8000 1
snd_emu10k1 96132 1
snd_rawmidi 21024 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_util_mem 3840 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_hwdep 8032 1 snd_emu10k1
agpgart 29488 2 fglrx,via_agp

Can you give a little more information? Are you experiencing a problem or are you just looking for a consultant for 'best practices'?

well i guess its a problem. the first thing is that when i am doing even slightly resource heavy like un tarring a tarball, the system LAGS big time. the mouse will barley move, and sometimes move in random directions. i find this weird becuase before i used to run mandrake 10.1 i didnt have this problem. but now on slack 10.1 (kernel 2.11.6.8) this happens.

Also, games will run for no more than five minutes, then the system hangs. so i wanted to look at my loaded modules,and it seemed very low.

I'm not too too experienced with this - but it may be IO schedulers in the kernel. Did you enable 'Preemptible Kernel Support'? Are you using a stock slack kernel, or are you downloading it from elsewhere (ie love, nitro, mm)?

do a `uname -r` . I'm thinking you meant that you're using 2.6.11-slackware-r8, as 2.11.6.8 isn't a real kernel

Are you running operations as root when this happens (ie untarring a tarball) or just as a regular user? I used to have problems similar to yours (freezing, partiticularly when running an operation as root), but I don't know exactly I fixed them. I think it was a matter of using a different kernel (or perhaps the different kernel having different IO schedulers).

Also, if you have a large amount of RAM (1gb+) make sure you enable 'Highmem Support (4gb)' otherwise the overhead of the paging table(?), or something, becomes to great and a lot of RAM goes to waste. I don't know that that would effect your general desktop speed though...

To answer your original question: I generally make everything a module unless I must have it to boot - ie SATA, ext2, ext3, reiserfs, LVM2, HID - stuff like that. In addition to sound and video, my network support, netfilter/iptables support, ieee1394, usb, usb2, printer, scanner, and such are loaded as modules.

yea i did mean 2.6.11.8, lol my bad i was typing to fast. i am running everything as root. and i am almost positive that that premptive kernel thing is loaded.

you definitely shouldn't be running everything as root. Running a process as root can allow it priorities that it shouldn't have (perhaps defying the preemptibility???). Try running everything as a user and just using 'sudo' as necessary.

You'll need to make sure you have a line something like '%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL' and you may want to uncomment (or add) 'Defaults:%wheel !env_reset' in /etc/sudoers because it drives me nuts when I do a 'DISPLAY=":0.0" sudo graphical-app' and it doesn't work due to the env_reset... argh... You'll need to be in the wheel group to use sudo.

To run as a regular user you probably need to be in groups like 'games,video,sound,cdrom,usb' and maybe a few others.

Try that and then see if you still experience the freezing.

well i tried running as a user other than root, i have only tried quake 3 so far
it ran twice as long before freezing