woooooow, I wonder if there is a wikibook where I can read all about how computers worked 10-20 years ago

To be specific, my (Debian) make-kpkg was humming along, albeit slowly (it's a 433Mh Celeron) and stopped after a compile error in USBNET.C (message you need to configure some hardware for this). So I went back into menuconfig and made the necessary change(s) (unchecked support for device(s) I don't have, put Tulip support in while I was in there) and ran make-kpkg clean again.

Result was what I was afraid of: all the object modules (.o) which had just been compiled got blown away. This would seem to be contrary to the whole make concept (only build what needs to be built based on recently changed source).

No Wiki that I know of, but I used to be active in the IBM-MAIN newsgroup and they archive all their stuff. All the posts from 1995 are here:

http://bama.ua.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind9501&L=ibm-main

Many similarities in generating the OS's, just different terms. The most startling difference is how little RAM (core) was available back (on the order of kilobytes) then and how much the OS accomplished in so little space (kind of like Linux today ).

I considered any type of telecommunication small miracles then and still do now.

I started compiling with the release of 2.6 kernel and the last count of my kernel compilation was # 154.

The first time I compiled my own kernel which was back in 1998 using Redhat 6.0, was an absolute thrill. Becoz, this is something I can never dream of doing in Windoz !! ;-)

I've compiled my own kernel at least 4 times (first was 2.4.x), but at least twice I was unsuccessful. I recently compiled my own 2.6.16.9 kernel on my Dell Latitude C610 Laptop. Everything works fine, except for my Synaptics (?) touchpad, which goes crazy or just hangs somewhere in the corner. However, this does not happen with a 2.4 kernel. I've discovered a patch that might fix this problem http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~tuukkat/tmp/linux-2.6.7-userdev.20040625.patch but it doesn't work with 2.6.16 and for some other reason I couldn't compile the 2.6.7 kernel on that machine. Any pointers on how I could compile 2.6.7 or how to rewrite the patch, so that it works in 2.6.16? I know about programming (C, C++, Java, Delphi, PHP, Shell scripting, ...) but I don't know how kernel patching works. I'm afraid I don't understand it at that low level.

Have a look here for more detail:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=28372
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=124567

Please, I've spent so much time on this issue and if you all are such gurus in installing kernels, maybe you can help. Thanks in advance.

Have a look at this Wiki, it seems pretty straightforward:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_a_Kernel_Patch

Hope this helps.

Same here, I'm always happy (and a little surprised) when I see that my custom-built kernel ACTUALLY WORKS.

I think ALSA was only integrated with the kernel source in the 2.6 series...that confused me at first when I recompiled my 2.4.29 kernel for the first time and couldn't get any sound (until I figured out what all those error messages meant, at least ).

The first time I compiled my own kernel I accidentaly missed the PCI drivers (or something). So I recompiled again (another stupid mistake), and again, and again... and then it worked! After that I used to compile a new kernel each time a new one was out. But now I just use the standard kernels that come with the distributions.

Mmhh, actually it didn't help much, because what I want to do is rewrite the patch, so that it works with the new kernel. I know how to patch a kernel with the right patch. But thanks anyway.

From what I understand the patch file is created by 'diff'
so the basic idea would be to copy the source from 2.6.x to a target file, add the code with '+' in front of it, delete the lines with '-' in front of them and run diff on the two.

You'd have to read and understand the effected sections of the code because there might not be exact matches on the deleted lines and variable names/symbols might not exactly match either.

Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide from http://www.tldp.org might be handy reference, I'll see if I can find more info.

*http://www.tldp.org *

ooooooooooooooh I'll add this one to my bookmarks

I'm so childish

His name is 'Hal'. Cigars and drinks all around.

<dmesg>
Linux version 2.6.8-686 (root@emach433) (gcc version 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-13)) #1 Thu Apr 27 17:23:30 EDT 2006

<*snip*>

<INIT log (/var/log/boot)>
Thu Apr 27 19:36:39 2006: Starting Hardware abstraction layer: hald.

LOL mimi - I too am "easily amused". :-D

awwwwwwwwwww, can I hold him?