The base system finished compiling today, so I set about building my kernel. Configuring the kernel isn't so bad except for the sitting around answering hundreds of questions part. Ironically, answering the questions took about as long as compiling the kernel on my 333 MHz box.
The funny thing about the kernel configuration is you never answer questions based on what you want to do, only on what features to include and exclude. To answer every question, I have think, "What does this feature allow me to do? Is that something I want to do?" More often than I'd like, I'm not sure what the feature does. Unless the help text provides something meaningful, I just make the feature a module. I've heard the 2.6.x series has a better config tool. I'll have to check it out sometime.
After getting the kernel compiled and installed, I went to reboot. Grub started just fine, but when it went to load the kernel, the machine immediately rebooted. I was going crazy! I messed with grub for an hour thinking I may have misconfigured it. That was a dead end. From everything I could find, grub was fine. I went back into my kernel configuration and disabled APM since I've heard that could be a culprit. But, disabling APM didn't work. Finally I resorted to stepping through all the configration menus again, one-by-one. When I hit the CPU options, I realized that I hadn't changed the default setting from "Pentium III" to my processor, AMD K6-2. (I could go on about how "make menuconfig" displays this option in a very non-obvious way, but I won't.) After a "make clean" and a recompile, all was well.
So, now I have working kernel on a working system...time to build X windows and gnome...oh boy!
Posted by enigma at February 29, 2004 10:35 PM