Timothy Murphy wrote:
Alexander Dalloz wrote:
...snip...
No, not in my opinion. To build an own custom kernel requires a lot of
other reading and investigation too. If you do not understand the whole
process it would just be luck to get a working kernel.
I don't agree.
Apart from making sure one has the requisite software as listed in Documentation/Changes, and going at least once through a long list of options,
I don't think one has to "understand the whole process" -
that sounds as though one needs a PhD in Computer Science to compile the kernel.
Actually I don't understand why people are so attached to the kernels ported with eg Fedora. I regard the kernel and distribution as more or less orthogonal, and would be unhappy with a distribution that made me use a given kernel. But this seems to be a minority opinion.
I would rather, that all distributions just contributed to the main kernel, and used their own patches very sparingly and for short term.
I have reserved hope that once FC2 comes out with 2.6, it won't be butchered as badly as 2.4 has become.
It's no wonder why many vendors have not yet embraced linux, I have come across many drivers that will not compile on RHL and Mandrake. When investigating the reason for the failure, I discovered they both share a lot of the same patches. In one case I was trying to compile rivatv and the patching was so extensive, I gave up on trying to make it work and bought a different tuner card.
The switch to the 2.6 kernel is a much bigger undertaking than any of the previous updates that I can remember. Because I don't officialy support linux anymore {we switched to FreeBSD} I don't have the time to research all the requirements of the 2.6 kernel, besides there are tens or hundreds of other people who are spending the time. Once FC2 comes out with 2.6, I will check it out to see if I can get any of the drivers and programs I had problems with before to compile. My hope is that there will only be a few security patches and not any 'enhancement' patches.
Good luck.
