Originally posted by okos:
Dennis,

That guide you linked above (provided by perry) has some steps which are inconsistent with both the Linux Kernel in a Nutshell book, and the instructions that come with the Linux kernel source in it's README file. I'd compare those before following it verbatim in the future. From reading it a little I can see why you might have had problems with that kernel recompile.

The reason you couldn't get the 2.6-kernel-build.txt last night is probably because my bandwidth there was used up for the day. That's why I'll be removing it from there and just leaving it here.

I'm glad you're being helped by the details. Post if you have more questions ... there are plenty of other guys here more experienced than I, so you should surely get the help you need.

My kernel panic
tnanks

From post #5:
You must have support for your / (root) filesystem built into the kernel. Looks like you don't. That's the most common mistake most of us make when we first start building new kernels.

Boot into your default kernel, and issue:
which will tell you which partitions are mounted where with which filesystems. Such as:
The / (root) partition, /dev/sda5, on that box is using the JFS filesystem. So in my kernel:
support for JFS is built in (CONFIG_JFS_FS=y).

Rather than rebuild the kernel, you can make an initrd (initial ramdisk) image and use that instead. Then your kernel will boot without you having to rebuild it. Read the instructions in /boot/README.initrd if you want to do that.

i used this method
Thanks for help my new kernels works :)

You are welcome ... so glad you got your first new kernel working!

Few questions about kernel settings.
 

I have a dell inspiron 5150 laptop, 512 ram, 60 gb Toshiba disk. nVidia GeForce FX 5200 64M, Mobile Pent 4
I was wondering about a few kernel settings.
1. ACPI or APM or neither.
2. High Resolution Timer support? Y or N
3. SLAB or SLUB

1 - ACPI
2 - HIGH_RES_TIMERS and NO_HZ and HZ_1000
3 - SLAB

Hi
Im not sure what you are saying here "NO_HZ and HZ_1000". I assume you are talking about either un-checking the timer frequency or selecting 1000 HZ. It seems that I only have the option of selecting one of the speeds 100,250, 300, or 1000. I dont have the option to deselect timer frequency.

FYI I found lshw quite helpful in finding my computer hardware.

Thanks for your help Bruce Hill

okos

You want 'make oldsilentmenuconfig'
 

It was clear. What's working well at the moment for me is to try 'make' with output to a file:
'make > ../out'

Besides reading as 'makeout', this causes all the 'works, OK' output to a text file one directory above the working directory, so only errors are displayed in the terminal. This way I don't have to dig through hundreds of rows of uneventful messages to find the few problems I want to fix by running 'make gconfig' again. IMO it's better as-is than 'greying out' options I might just decide I want to change, for example because I notice that I want to add support for a peripheral I forgot I had, until I saw an error message from a neighboring directory. Or, what have you. It's just another mundane example of giving us more options, and how that works better as you become aware of more of your options.

Now, please excuse me, I'm going to go check whether, after fixing a problem in drivers/net, there are any other errors in the 'make' command that was running when I started this reply.

It sounds like a great idea. Could you show the entire command? Please understand Im quite new to Linux.

okos

people do make > /dev/null so that only errors are display iirc.

/dev/null
 

Chuckle, you're so right! I actually wanted to store the output for review because I was getting warnings but not FATAL errors, and didn't think of the obvious answer to that question at the time. Funny.

> /directory/filename
 

Sure thing.

In general, you can use the symbol '>' after any command to redirect the output of that command from the terminal to a file, whose location you specify just after '>' so in this case, to mimic the 'C:\...\Desktop\file.txt' you're probably accustomed to in that other operating system, the form is:

[command] > /home/[yourusername]/Desktop/file

Note: Extensions are not generally necessary in Linux. I believe there are a couple exceptions, in software ported from Windows, but native Linux apps associate programs to files by the content, not the filename extension, so you can call log files confusing-error.log, or log.frustrating, or dear.diary, if it's that kind of a log. Welcome to Linux.

Thanks a bunch for the response and the learning lesson;).
okos

After two weeks on working to configure my new kernel I ran into a slight snag. For some reason I don't have the option to boot the new kernel in lilo. Here is my lilo.conf file.

I followed Bruce Hill's instructions on installing a new 2.6 kernel.