Hi all-

I am running Fedora 8 on an HP dv2715nr laptop, but I'd like to cut out some of the kernel bloat and re-compile for a leaner system. I would preferably like to keep the distribution kernel (2.6.25.14-69.fc8), because I hate having to install the nvidia drivers by hand, and I know the nvidia-kmod supplied by my package manager works. I copy the proper directory from /usr/src/kernels to /home/me/linux, and I can re-configure the kernel properly, but when I run make (as root), I get the following error:

make[1]: *** No rule to make target 'missing-syscalls'. Stop.
make: *** [prepare0] error 2

I have the proper kernel sources and headers installed from the 'dev' repo in the package manager. Is it not possible to re-compile a distribution kernel? Any ideas? Thanks in advance for your input!

Cheers!

Just curious - what is it that you consider "kernel bloat" ?

If you copy things to your home directory, you should make sure you own all the files (make sure you set the permissions to 'me:me' on all the files, assuming 'me' is your username). And you only need root to do the install, not the compile.

It is possible, but perhaps you are making a mistake somewhere?
Follow the link listed below and from there see if you still have problems:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/CustomKernel

Also, I hope you know that you do not have to always install the nvidia driver by hand. You can use 'akmod' which will dynamically recreate the nvidia driver (kmod-nvidia) everytime a new kernel RPM is installed:
# yum install akmod-nvidia

Also, there is a small possibility that if you deviate too much from the Fedora kernel that the kmod-nvidia you have may not work. Since it is compiled for the Fedora default kernel, not *your* modified kernel. Although you can always recompile the kmod-nvidia from source against your new kernel as well.