LiLo bmp's are a bit tricky. I haven't gotten one to work that I made with Gimp. But I have made some work when I made them with Windows (7) Paint.

Here is a nice (old) article explaining how to do it with Gimp, (that I used with MS Paint): https://princessleia.com/liloSplash.php

I also have a handful of them in the slack-wallpapers SlackBuild on SBo.
Or you can find them on my GitHub here.
Make sure to read the accompanying .txt file with the images.

1 members found this post helpful.

No output available since kernel panics on every boot attempt, regardless of whether I create and define initrd.gz or not. On this kernel that works, only thing dmesg outputs is some invalid data for the touchpad (although everything works)

The last few times the panic message is always the same: system unable to mount my /dev/sda4 ext4 filesystem as /

Skaendo: I had a buddy send me a 640x480 bmp image (A pro graphic designer), that I only downgraded in quality using gimp options mentioned before. This eventually became the way easier of the two options posted, but thanks for sharing!

@ Scribtor

I'd suggest to not "over-complicate" yourself with the initial ramdisk for your own kernel compilation if you have a modern system with at least 256-512MB RAM.

If you start your kernel build with the default config (make defconfig), you should have all the options (HW support) needed to successfully boot the kernel, unless your HW is somewhat special.
You can follow this short guide I wrote recently for compiling your own kernel - adapt it to your desired kernel version:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...8/#post6052734
- for your case, stop after the step "make modules_install", never mind the rest of the instructions, and just manually copy the kernel, as advised by hazel in post #6

Add a new image section to your /etc/lilo.conf and execute /sbin/lilo
You'll have two kernels, your own and the one Slackware is providing, which you can continue to update (slackpkg). If you need to cleanup your own kernel, just delete the file(s) you manually copied in /boot , remove/comment the extra image section you defined in lilo (don't forget to run lilo afterwards) and delete the /lib/modules/your-kernel folder.

Thanks for the help!


Kernel is now showing progress.

Using the instructions from the previous post, I was able to survive kernel panic events and the kernel image again produced an environment that is without wifi,no touchpad, no sound, and no ntfs-3g support for two of my win ntfs partitions

(I've tested the wired connection and it works, so there's something at least)

Attached is the dmesg output that was asked a few posts back

Attached Files

output.txt (44.0 KB, 19 views)

Your dmesg output shows that you do not have the regulatory.db package. You should install that. A lot of network drivers need it. That might even be (part of) the reason you don't have wi-fi.

I made a bit of a mess of my kernel upgrade and have only just got Slackware up and running again, so here is a piece of hard-won advice for anyone who reads this thread: when you create a new initrd, do not use the default output /boot/initrd.gz. That will overwrite your old initrd and then it won't help you that you saved your old kernel as a backstop. You won't be able to boot it because the initrd won't match, and if you can't boot the new kernel either, you're stuck. I had to chroot over from LFS to create an initrd that worked with the new kernel.

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Same thing happened to me but I managed to salvage myself by overwriting it all thanks to slackpkg and the fact that a new kernel version was released, so...yeah.

I grabbed the config for the current kernel version (4.19.83) from the slackware site, and am recompiling again, but using the new stable kernel 5.3.10.

Will update with what effects that had.

The i915 firmware also did not load. I am not sure what problems that could cause.

Do "lsmod" to see which modules loaded.

BTW, you are compiling the kernel on an Atom. You must have a lot of patience.
Ed

If he doesn't have i915, X will probably use modesetting instead.

@Scribtor
You should first investigate what HW is available in your laptop in order to know what HW support (options) to enable in the kernel you're compiling.
The following commands will provide you some info on the HW available:
lspci & lsusb will show the available WiFi & Sound Card.
On inputs, you can also grep the dmesg after "input:" and indeed, I also noticed your touchpad was not recognized. On some modern laptops the touchpad is connected through the i2c interface and I believe the i2c_hid driver is not enabled in your kernel.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/I2C
On NTFS, again, you need to enable the support in the kernel:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/NTFS

@EdGr
Modern Celerons (Atoms too) are pretty fast, I suspect it won't take more than 1 hour to get the kernel & modules (standard config) built.
From OP's dmesg:
On the i915 firmware, if the OP used the "make defconfig" target, then the i915 driver is built as built-in module and the firmware needs to be also available built-in in the kernel:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Intel#Firmware
Alternatively, configure the kernel and build i915 as an external module, this way the /lib/firmware will be available by the time the i915 module is loaded.

Running out of ideas here....My last attempt resulted in an inadvertent overwrite of the working kernel because when I build using the huge config downloaded from the slackware site, the result produced no bzImage to just copy it to /boot/ so not knowingly i ran the "make install" which, well, destroyed the kernel and the new kernel resulted in a panic event. I only recovered couple of minutes ago.

On the topic of CPU speed, both building of 5.3.9 with 4.19.82 huge slack-config and 5.3.10 with 4.19.83 huge slack-config lasted a full five hours. (each, not combined for both)

I tried building with generic, and even USING the generic kernels provided by slackpkg, but those kernels don't have the necessary drivers for wifi/touchpad (can't remember as to whether ntfs-3g was there or not)

@Scribtor

If you take the .config from older kernels (the ones Slackware is providing) and use it for your own kernel configuration (5.3.x), then I suggest to use the standard name for the config - .config (rename it when you put it in the 5.3.x source tree), don't run "make mrproper" and instead of:
I never use older kernel .config files to start a newer kernel compilation but only use them as inspiration (parse/diff).

On your mistake with make install instead of manually copying your new kernel build files (vmlinuz & System.map) in /boot, overwriting the symlinks, you can easily correct it:
Your lilo.conf is pointing to the symlinks for the default kernel image Slackware is providing and this should be the way to go if you want to keep the default kernel maintained by the Slackware update tools. Slackware is using these symlinks to perform kernel updates and not bother amending the /etc/lilo.conf for each new kernel.

P.S.
You should also delete the /lib/modules/5.3.xx before every kernel rebuild.

I don't want to overwrite the default kernel Slackware provides, but to add a second kernel to the system.

As the title suggests, my end goal is to have three boot options in LILO

1. label = l // Kernel provided by slackpkg updates

2. label = k // Latest stable 5.x kernel that is presumed to have at least all the drivers of kernel under number 1. Suppose I did download this from kernel.org

3. label = w // win10 boot partition

I already figured out how to get points 1 and 3 working, but it's the number 2 that's giving me a headache.

Questions:

1. Would I need a second initrd?
2. How to configure/build/boot this second kernel?
3. Am I wrong to assume that newer kernels have better configured hardware controllers/drivers and also controllers/drivers for more recent hardware?


P.S. Perhaps it was overlooked or not stated precisely> building 5.x kernels produced no bzImage/vmlinuz files that one could copy. I later discovered that there is a shell script that would produce this, but this was after the script was run under "make install" and at that point, I rebooted the system not knowing my kernel was gone to panic

1. No!, only if you like to make your life more complicated.
2. Build it and update the /etc/lilo.conf as advised in my post #18
3. No, you're right, however, the kernel Slackware -current is providing is not that old - should work well on new HW.

On:
Well, that's a lot of time. I hope you use both cores for the compilation (make -j2). Configuring a kernel is not that easy, as there are many options you need to care about. As mentioned before, I never used .config files from other kernels when I built my own kernels, instead, used make defconfig and removed things I didn't need (like pcmcia) and added the extra drivers & HW support that were required.

Just to provide you with a concrete example on how to configure your /etc/lilo.conf for your goal - note that this is just a generic example and some paths & syntax need correction/adaptation.
In your /etc/lilo.conf (after the global options), you should have:

If you are running -current, is there some reason why you are not trying the 5.4 kernel in /testing?

I know it's not the "stable" release, but you could use the configs in there as a starting point.