Well! That was a learning curve!
Firstly let me tell you all that I am writing this using my new, SMP/PIII Kernel, a MUCH faster machine overall!
Thanks to all of you that helped so far.
So far?
Yes, 'cause the battle is not yet over!
Forgetting all the rest (read on below if you're interested in the details - and the gotchas!) once I successfully
booted into Linux using my new Kernel and started KDE (with startx) I got the following window, labelled
'artsmessage':
- Error while initializing the sound driver device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such device).
Now, I had no problem with the single-CPU Kernel that came with the Slackware 10.1 distro, so I thought this
was very strange.
I have a Creative Labs Audigy 2 Value card, which is in the HCL list, and which worked fine before my compilation
of an SMP Kernel. During reconfiguration of the Kernel, I only touched the SMP and CPU Type parameters, leaving
all the others unchanged, so I figured whaaaaaa?
So I:
- ran Alsaconf - which found no known sound cards
- ran /sbin/lspci - which gave: Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs: Unknown device 0008
- found that modprobe.conf is empty
so I looked at the ALSA packages with Kpackage (in KDE) and found that for the package:
alsa-driver-1.0.8-2.4.29-i486-1, all the files under the directory /lib/modules/2.4.29/kernel are missing!!
So the /lib/modules/2.4.29/kernel/sound directory and all its contents are missing!
I'm not sure, but this should have been the situation under the original Kernel, when my sound card worked!
I didn't touch any package at all in generating the new Kernel.
What's going on? Anyone out there know?
PS A few Gotchas when changing Kernels
------------------
I followed the well-known
sticky and found:
Gotcha 1: - When modifying lilo.conf, instead of : label = slack.old I used : label = 1_CPU Linux -- WRONG!
The label text should not have spaces because the make install script fails with Install error 2 and lilo.conf is not modified automagically to include the new Kernel as an option in Lilo boot.
Gotcha 2: - When running the sequence of commands in that sticky, then re-booting into the old Kernel (which should have been exactly the same as my previous one), I found that :
- My NVIDIA module had NOT been included AND
- the mouse could not be found (
).
So if you want to keep using your old (and laboriously set-up) configuration, BEWARE! I guess you will need to copy your old vmlinuz and map etc. manually!