It might sound rather old to some of you, but to me it is kind of new. That is, compiling a kernel. I have now been running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS for 4 months now and SuSE 10.1 for a month. However, I have not done any compiling. Can someone let me know what are some of the pros and cons of compiling a kernel, and is it recommended for every user to do so? What is the level of difficulty of compiling?
Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

Compiling is pretty easy. But keep your old one around just in case.

In general, my rule of thumb is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" followed closely by "If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet".

Honestly, I don't recompile unless I need some specific hardware support that isn't in the stock kernel or if I have an old machine that will benefit from removing the bloat. Most new machines won't see a performance benefit from a recompile. But my old Celeron 400MHz w/ 256MB RAM become much more usable once I cut out all the hardware modules I didn't need.

That said, I like to fiddle. And you'll learn some things by recompiling that you wouldn't have known before...

Thank you.

BTW, it looks like you're using Ubuntu, which is Debian based. There's a "Debian Way" to compile kernels that basically creates a *.deb package of your kernel and then you can just install it like any other package using dpkg -i package.deb

Tombiz, for your information:
http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html

That's for Debian, I think it should be more or less the same on Ubuntu.

Apart from showing off and demonstrating that you're the GEEK , compiling kernels is a great way of learning the gory-detail of your computer, and so you'll appreciate what the developers have done. *Salute*

Just run the following command under the kernel tree, and admire the output:
Well, just kidding . You know I love the developers .

If you are using a package-based distro, I would not be in a great big hurry to compile your own kernel. In my experience, sometimes the binary-distributed kernels match the source code; and sometimes they don't quite. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."