Hi again folks I know that various folks have got win4lin running under fedora. But apparently one has to "rebuild the kernel"! What the . . .?? Can anyone help with this exercise, or point me to a "how to" that isn't in "nerd speak"? thanks John
That's a two-part answer. If you're running Fedora 1 with the 2.4 kernel, you have a pretty good shot at installing Win4Lin which will automatically build a new kernel with the kernel features needed to run Win4Lin. If you're running a 2.6 kernel, you'll need to go through the process of downloading the kernel patch, applying it to the kernel source code, building the kernel and installing it. Most of this process is pretty well automated, so it's not as bad as it sounds.
It's written up on Netraverse's website. You have a couple of options. You can download, build and install a generic kernel that supports Win4Lin from there. Otherwise, you need to identify which kernel you're using and download the relevant patches from Netraverse.
You apply the patch to the kernel source and then follow the normal steps to rebuild the kernel. It sounds a lot harder than it really is. It's a two-step process, typically, to extract the appropriate patch. The patch adds the adapter to the kernel that supports Win4Lin.
Once you've done these steps and rebooted into the new kernel, you can install and configure Win4Lin. I won't claim it's the most fun I've spent on a Friday night, but it's reliable and there's a certain kick in being able to do this. It'll serve you well in the future.
There's a lot of good reasons for doing this, mostly because you can do a lot of explicit control over which features get lashed onto the kernel. You can disable the stuff that's deadweight and pretty much maximize the performance of your kernel.
Bill
