There is no way I know of that you can autodetect your hardware and generate a .config file based upon what was autodetected. That would really be nice if it were possible.

So you have two choices:

1. Stick with the kernels supplied by the distros. And only upgrade when they decide to upgrade.
2. Learn to build your own kernel.

And part of learning to build a kernel is knowing your hardware. If you don't want to make all those extra sound modules and you are sure you don't need them you can de-select them. Building them will not in any way affect your kernels performance. If you don't need the modules they will not be loaded by the kernel. They just take up a little hard drive space and a little processing time to build them.

As for your keyboard and mouse, that sounds like a XFree86 config problem. Login as root and do this:
XFree86 -configure
That will create a config file /root/XFree86Config.new and you can test it by doing this:
XFree86 -xf86config /root/XFree86Config.new
If it works then copy the file to /etc/X11/XFree86Config-4
Otherwise you will need to manually configure XFree86 using xf86config.

"cat arch/i386/boot/bzImage >/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.23"

why is it that when you compile a kernel you have to do cat on bzImage
rather than just copying bzImage to where the kernel belongs?

i just cp it. it seems to work fine. cat was a typo maybe?

I agree...I've never had to cat it. Although, I mostly use make which automates all that stuff. Lazy, but hey...my time costs money

The kernel should be a continuous file. Most likely on any Linux filesystem it will be, however there are no guarantees, unless you use either cat or dd to copy it. I read that a long time ago (I forget where) and I have always used cat to copy my kernels ever since.

"make install" will do the rest of the housekeeping, isnt it? so, why bother to "cat arch/i386/boot/bzImage >/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.23"?? am i right?? or, i might be wrong...moreover, DaOne never mentioned bzImage copying in his steps...so, i believe "make install" will do the rest of the housekeeping, including lilo.conf editing....

make install will copy and rename the image to /boot/vmlinuz. It also renames the old vmlinuz to vmlinuz.old. It does NOT edit lilo.conf for you...you have to do this before running make install...however it WILL run lilo to properly update Lilo.

Also, you need to edit the Makefile to make sure your new kernel is copied to the appropriate directory.

If you are using 8.1 or later, open /usr/src/linux/Makefile in a text editor, scroll to line 74 and
uncomment the the line #export INSTALL_PATH=/boot.
For 8.0 you must leave this line commented.

So yes...if lilo.conf and Makefile are properly prepared, make install automates the copying, moving, and updating lilo.