> The only issue here is that the kernel will also need to move up (from 2.2.17 > to at least 2.2.19 and maybe 2.4.9 (I'm assuming from what's in testing's > packages)). And he claims to have a dual pentium machine. Just plain pentium > he says (though I was pretty sure you needed at least pentium pro for dual > processing).
Well, there you'd be wrong. Dual processor Pentium I and <gasp> 486 boxes do indeed exist. They were somewhat rare, but they were built and sold to anyone with the money to buy them. I don't know if consumer level motherboards for even older chips were made. I think most multi-cpu 386 and earlier machines were asymmetric, with additional CPU's sitting on daughter cards on the ISA bus. > So question 1 is, the 2.4.9-686-smp package exists and claims ppro, celeron, > PII, PIII compatibility. Might it be an over-sight that there's no mention > it'll also supports this aledged dual pentium (if such a thing exists). > [see bottom for current top part of dmesg] If it's compiled for 686, it probably won't work well on 586 class systems. I don't know if it would work or not for certain, but I wouldn't count on it. > Question 2 revolves around a custom irq setting for 3c509 card support. > Currently in /etc/modules.conf he has arguments to the 3c509 card that set a > non-detected/defaulted irq and base so that it'll work. how do I find out if > a debian built kernel package supports 3c509 and if its a module or not > without actually installing the package and then reading through the > contents... or downloading and extracting the contents somehow. Shouldn't > there be some info about that somewhere in a header, or on a package > maintatiner's web-page [which I havn't found, though I looked]. Go to http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages. At the bottom of the page, there's a file search form. Search for "3c509.o" in the testing (or unstable) distribution, and you'll get a list of kernel packages that support the 3c509 as a module. I think most of them would. > Also the answer to this question would be useful in letting me build a similar > kernel that I know will support 3c509 as a module, and work with his smp > machine. I'd like to have most of the generic stuff in there too, but I don't > know what it is right now. Building a custom kernel is always the first thing I do after installing Debian. There's a Kernel HOWTO which explains all the details of how to build and install kernels. Eric
