Hello guys!
First of all I apologize for my bad English, but now come to my questions.
I'm new to linux and I recently installed slackware64 14.0 on my laptop. I followed the slackbook at www.slackbook.com and the documentation at docs.slackware.com to configure what i can, but I would like to understand a few things about the kernel and the initrd. After creating the initrd with the utility mkinitrd_command_generator.sh and started the generic kernel, now I want to understand the function of the initrd and when i need to recreate it. For example, if I upgrade my kernel to a new version I have to recreate the initrd? Or I can use the same?
About to the kernel, if I want to compile the kernel using only the necessary modules for my hardware where should I start? I know that the process of compiling the kernel is more or less in this manner http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8869931/compiling-the-2-6-0-kernel-on-slackware and that there are different ways to configure the kernel as the "config file" or "xconfig" "menuconfig" but how do I find during this process the modules strictly necessary?

Thanks in advance for your answers and i will appreciate any links, HowTo or resource that can help me

Your English seems great to me.

You should recreate a new initrd and reinstall lilo.

Sorry, I cannot help you here, have not had to compile a kernel for ages and forgot how. This guide (alien bob's site) may be helpful.

John

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I don't know if you speak French, but I've written a few HOWTOs on the subject.

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/L...rnel-HOWTO.txt

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/L...LILO-HOWTO.txt

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Purpose of initrd is to include as many kernel modules and utilities, which are not included in kernel itself, as needed to boot system. Huge kernel includes almost everything and it's capable of booting by itself most of the time, while generic kernel needs initrd to boot.

I believe it's a typo. You only need to run lilo to update MBR, not reinstall, after every change with kernel or initrd.

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Sorry Nitrogen1, this is clearly off topic...

Nicolas, loading your files in Firefox, one was recognized as Windows-1252 and the other one as UTF-8, though both be encoded in ISO-8859-1 (as set in vim and confirmed by iconv here). There is nothing we can actually do about that (probing the encoding of a file is too tricky), but I'd suggest you always use UTF-8. As a reminder, converting an existing file is just a matter of:I did that with your files and that doesn't increase their size much.

Only my of course

PS Your HOW-TOs are well written, as usual.