Kernel Recompile Woes...
 

I'm pretty sure I've tried everything and this is the second thread that I've started on this forum to try to get somewhere but still nothing. I can't get my soundcard or network card to load and i'm sure it has something to do with module loading (i'm making myself sound even dumber than I feel). Here's what I did

make mrproper
make xconfig
make dep
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18
cp System.map /boot/System.map

Updated the GRUB file and then booted into it. Everything seems to work except for ethernet and sound. Please help!!!

What is your NIC and sound card?

Soundblaster Live!

3com Etherlink XL 10/100 PCI

The thing is, when I originally installed RedHat 7.2 on my box from the CD's it got these cards fine. Why isn't it now?

I can't help much about the network card except that i've seen the card section in Networking Support I called Ethernet 10/100 support. Should probably find it and build it in there. As far as the sound card. I use an SB Live! and you'll wanna either build straight in the SB Live! support in sound support or build it as a module. If you build it as a module, you'll need to load it on startup in modules.conf or what redhat uses...If it's supposed to be a module due to you already building it as one, on the command line do an /sbin/modprobe emu10k1. If it loads you won't see anything, but an lsmod should show it as loaded. If sounds works after that, you know you just have to add it to the startup process...

Wow... slow down chief. You're losing me a little on that one. If you could explain what you just said in a little more newbie-ized version that would be fantastic.


Also, on a related question... I look in my boot folder and there are other things from my RedHat install that I don't know how they got there or what they do. For example I have

kernel.h-2.4.7
initrd-2.4.7-10.img
module-info-2.4.7-10

I don't really know what any of these do. Do I need them when for the 2.4.18 kernel I'm trying to compile? If so how do I get them?

hello,
i see you omitted make clean - i am sure this is an oversite - right.

here is my kernel config which has the sblive set up as a module

http://members.telocity.com/cph013/config_2416

you could save this - then do a load from in xconfig then modify the other entries as needed, and also the config should would fine going from 2.4.16 to 2.4.18

Wow, I'm starting to feel like I really have no idea what I'm doing. I thought that you could do make mrproper instead of doing make clean. Or do you still need to do a make clean somewhere else? Argghh.... the more documentation I read the more confused I get. Also, do I need to do something special to get rid of my old/failed recompile attempts before trying again or will just trying again overwrite the old ones?

hello,
here is a little thing i wrote up on compiling kernels which i hope may help:

http://www.linuxjunior.org/cgi-bin/p...T=Display&id=9

pbharris,

Thank you so much your website helped me recollect my thoughts and things are starting to make sense again. A couple quick questions, if I use GRUB do I want to do make bzlilo ? I'm guessing not but i'm just not sure anymore. Thank you.

As you collect your thoughts, no you don't have to do a make bzlilo if you use GRUB since they are seperate bootloaders. If pbharris' kernel documentation doesn't help, i'll go on to explain what I said, but I won't confuse you any further until then. =) Only thing is that make clean actually doesn't need to be in there after make dep. It can often cause trouble as well. A make mrproper at the beginning should suffice.

Well... this just doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere. Here's what I did now

cp -R /boot /boot2418
make mrproper
make xconfig
make dep
(make clean) ###once with and once without
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
mkinitrd initrd-2.4.18.img 2.4.18
mv System.map /boot2418/.
mv arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot2418/vmlinuz-2.4.18
mv vmlinux /boot2418/.
mv initrd-2.4.18.img /boot2418/.

Updated GRUB and here's what happened. When I did this with make clean my computer would just reboot as soon as GRUB tried to load the new kernel. When I didn't use the make clean I got to the point where it says, "Uncompressing Linux...Ok, booting the kernel" and then it just hangs. Oy.

Okay, I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this thread or if they care. But I'm going to throw this post to the wind and see.

I actually managed to compile the 2.4.18 kernel, I booted into it and I'm right now listening to mp3's and on the internet so I know that my sound and network cards work. However, I was reading the system messages as I was booting in and there was an error that said something like "modprobe: can't locate module char-major...." something like that at least, the messages go by way too fast. I'm sure that it was modprobe though. What could this be? Should I worry?

Also, I copied some mp3's onto my fat drive so that I could listen to them in Linux and well quite frankly... they sound really bad. Much worse than when I listen to them in Windows. Could this be something having to do with my fat filesystem support, my sounddriver that I installed or the linux mp3 player? Thanks so much to everyone who has helped me thus far.