I've noticed there's a lot of stuff in the kernel that I don't particular need, like any architecture other than x86/i386. Could I safely delete these directories from the kernel source and compile a new kernel, or would this be considered a bad idea?

If it's safe, where else could I possibly save some space?

Do a make clean to save space (save your .config before)

Oh, does make clean take care of what I was talking about?

It will remove *.o files, you will win 50 MB or such.

What kind of space are you trying to save?

If it's disk space, the 2.6.7 kernel that ships with Slack 10.0 is 1.4 MB on disk. The kernel source tree is unecessary as long as you don't need to comple anything, so you could remove the kernel source package. You can clean things up a bit by running `make mrproper` from /usr/src/linux, but that won't save enough space to make it worth the time to even type the command, especially considering that it removes all your kernel config files.

You could save a little RAM by removing support for hardware you don't need. Just use `make menuconfig` and remove the stuff you think you don't need. However, if you don't absolutely know what you're doing, you can remove too much and end up with a kernel that doesn't work as well as the supplied kernel. Again, not worth is IMO given the small amount of RAM the kernel occupies and the relatively huge amounts of RAM in modern systems. Also, most hardware support is in modules that are not loaded into RAM until they are needed.

Recompiling the kernel can speed up your system a bit, but it's always been a marginal improvement for me, so I stopped doing it. I only compile new kernels now when I want to use newer versions that aren't with slack-current. For instance, 2.6.10 isn't part of slack-current, but I decided to run it anyway.

Give us a bit more information on what you're trying to accomplish, please.

I was mostly just curious if I need to have all that /arch stuff if I was never gonna use it.

My Kernel sourse is around 150 MB, because I never clean it.. cuz I do a lot of kernel mods here 'n there

But you can delete packages that you don't use!

If you're on KDE, run: Package Manager (KPackage), under the System menu.
If you're a sheller, fire your shell and type pkgtool

Make sure you read the description of each package before removing it! and even if you removed a package by mistake, you'll find it in the installation CDs.

If you want to reduce the kernel size (the compiled one), go to your source directory :
/usr/src/linux
make xconfig

and remove all the options you don't need, like AppleTalk, if you're not on a network with Mac computers, you don't need that protocol, and so on.

Recompile your kernel, and as suggested above, clean it. I wouldn't clean it untill I reboot and test everything to make sure I havn't removed something needed in the kernel.