OT: Linux flavors...

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>When asked his whereabouts on Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 03:43:11PM -0700,
>Bill Campbell took the fifth, drank it, and then slurred:
>> 
>> We're running 9.1 on a test machine here, and have run into a few
>> headaches, primarily with devices that aren't fully supported on
>> the 2.6.x kernels yet (e.g. nvidea graphics).  I'm probably going
>
>Something fetchnvidea doesn't even help with?

It didn't when I last tried it several weeks ago.

I haven't had much time to fiddle with new toys lately as I've been busy
studying zope, plone, and python.  I've actually written two python scripts
that do Real Work(tm) (although I must admit that I use comments ``#{'' and
``#}'' around long indentation blocks so that I can use the vi ``%'' key to
navigate quickly :-).

>> The folks who do Win4Lin seem to have stopped releasing any
>> prepatched kernels.  They had been doing them as recently as SuSE
>> 9.0 (or was it 8.2).  IHMO, this isn't the smartest thing they
>> ever did as configuring Linux kernels is almost a lost art since
>> the modular kernels, first from Caldera, now from SuSE have been
>> so good at providing the necessary support without having to deal
>> with building your own kernels.
>
>I don't get it.  Why build the whole kernel?  Just build a module against
>the particular release of a vendor's kernel.  Someone from this list (I
>don't even remember who) had a D-Link wireless card and some other dist I
>never would have put in place (maybe RH9).  I took a RH7.3 box and just
>dumped the matching kernel source tree and compiled the module against it,
>then gave him the module binaries.  You don't even have to be -running- the
>kernel...just have the same source tree.

I've done that by rote for some kernel modules, but I'm totally out of
practice doing the whole ``make mrproper; make xconfig'' thing.

Bill
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