A silly question .....please humour me
 

Is it possible to get Linux (Redhat 7.1) to recognize a USB ethernet adapter? The Linksys 10/100 USB Network Adapter, i'm pretty sure it'll need a driver any pointers on it's possible locations would be greatly appreciated

What you can do is go to /etc/rc.d and edit the rc.modules file and find the usb support section and uncomment the applicable fields to enable usb support. It may or may not have the correct Linksys support, but it is possible, you may just need to download linux specific drivers from Linksys.

i looked for etc/rc.d but i only found rc which isn't a directory i opened it anyway with less and
that wasn't very helpful. there were four other directories rc0.d , rc1.d rc2.d rc3.d, and none of them contained a file called rc.modules. when linux boots up i see usb uhci activated and it probes for new devices and ofcourse Linksys doesn't have any linux drivers.

Any ideas as to why the Kernel won't support vfat file system anymore?

where did that question come from??

if you've recompiled the kernel maybe you didn't insatll the modules... no idea if that's relevant, vfat will always be supported

that question came from the fact that since i can't connect Linux to the internet i mounted my windows partition so i can download linux files and take them from the windows parition but now i can't do that.....i've followed all of the kernel compile instructions but i honestly couldn't tell you if i compiled it correctly or not.

this is what i used


make mrproper
make menuconfig
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
make modules
make modules-install
make bzlilo

That's pretty much how you do it. The real problems occur when you edit the kernel options and end up modularizing something that shouldn't i.e. the ext2fs. Or one option depends on another. It took me a while to get a good working kernel, it wouldn't have taken me as long if I had read EVERY help file per option. It's pretty tedious, but it explains fairly well enough what should and shouldn't be done yadda yadda yadda...If you rebuilt the kernel and forgot to make sure FAT was checked yes and all options applying, or if you made your fat support a module on an IDE drive, you'll have those and many other problems. Go in there and look specifically for that and see what may have happened. Hope this helped any..Good luck...

Sorry I didn't notice before, but did you mistype make modules-intsall or is this exactly how you typed it? It should be make modules_install (underscore) instead of hyphen.

i mistyped it, i used modules_install,i tried not to mess around too much with the options to keep them working like the old kernel but i'll go through the options one by one and see what's the deal because right now my sound doesn't work, vfat isn't recognized, the hardware clock won't sync with the system clock and the list goes on and on and on.....the joys of modulehood!!