I booted up the SuSE 10.0 live DVD yesterday. I'm trying to determine if I should upgrade my laptop from 9.2 yet. I'm a big fan of the, "if it aint broke, don't fix it" philosophy.

If seen mention a number of times of GPL kernel modules and nonGPL kernel modules. My laptop has ATI graphics and Atheros wireless which I gather from the release notes are both nonGPL kernel modules.

Now my question, to use these, do I actually need to recompile the kernel or simply install the modules (as per whatever instructions are provided) and allow modprobe to do its thing?

I guess the next question is, do I need to recompile them every time I patch the kernel?

1. You don't need to recompile the kernel. Third-party modules like those can't be built in to the kernel so they just get built as modules and modprobe handles inserting them.

2. Yes, modules work with the kernel they were compiled against. If you update your kernel you're goging to need to rebuild the modules for video and your wireless.