KDE Kernel Configurator

From: vagabond (adivvy_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 10/30/03 

Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 15:18:36 +0000

Dear all

I'm stuck.

I have put together an RH9 machine for a client to use as a small
file/print/mail server. That went very well apart from lockups due to glx
and the ATI Rage 128 pro card. Occasionally the whole machine would
lockup due to things like GL scrensavers. Some googling showed that this
was a known problem, which I solved by commenting out the glx module in
XF86Config.

It seemed quite stable apart from (harmless?) errors - "GLX Extention
missing..." - when launching some apps from a console.

Now, I was looking around in KDE's Control Centre, Linux Kernel and found
that the option for ATI Rage support wasn't enabled, so I decided to have
a go at enabling support for somathing on my own RH9 box.

I'm new to most of this. I started kcontrol as root and chose Parallel
support and enabled it, and a few of its options, as modules. Clicked
Apply and was told to run "make symlinks dep". Cd'd to /usr/src/linux-2.4
and did. Things whirred away for a few minutes and stopped with no
errors.

What do I do now. The KDE Control Centre has no help files for Kernel
Configurator. More googling indicates steps along the lines of:

[quote]

1.) configure the kernel with the Linux Kernel Configurator (of KDE3) 2.)
 make symlinks dep
3.) make dep
4.) make clean
5.) make bzImage
6.) make modules
7.) make modules_install
8.) make install
9.) copied /usr/local/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage ->
/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.10 (or 2.4.18)
10.) copied /usr/src/linux/System.map -> /boot/System.map-2.4.10 (2.4.18)
11.) checked /etc/rc.config so see if there are any clashes of modules ->
none...
12.) backed up /boot/initrd -> /boot/initrd.bkp 13.) ran mk_initrd to
create new initrd file 14.) checked /etc/lilo.conf:

[/quote]

(This seemed to be for compiling an entire new kernel)

Before going any further should I follow these (or similar) steps or is
the job now done?

I notice that some new files (.config, .depend, .hdepend) have been
created in this dir as well as /usr/src/linux-2.4.20-20.9 and other files
in .../arch/i386 have been modified.

How would I check that it all worked?

Assuming that this is the way to add functionality to the kernel, are
there any gotchas which I should be aware of before doing the same on the
client's machine?

Thanks

John

Relevant Pages