On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, lin q wrote: > Hi, > I am to run "make menuconfig", the options are so huge, i am afraid to > make mistakes and hard to figure out in later period. > > My host currently runs Fedora Core 1, I wonder if somewhere I can find a > good reference to config the kernel? Image that in installing, Fedora > already figured out the correct config... >
If you believe that, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you ;-) Seriously, all distros attempt to support a large number of different machines from a single config. Many of us can happily get rid of a lot of the options, some of us need to add other options to give us the functions we need. But, as long as you have enough to successfully boot your machine, make whatever network connections you need, and mount all your filesystems then you can always tweak it later. If fedora has a /proc/config.gz file, you could use that as a basis. Or maybe there is a config in their kernel-source rpm. For rolling your own, lspci (to confirm ide, ethernet, usb, and vga controllers) is helpful. If in doubt, add more things (as modules, or built in). Choose the correct cpu, make sure the file system(s) (ext2/3, maybe reiser or xfs, maybe dos, maybe nfs) are built in, select the various controllers you have, otherwise maybe go with the defaults. Most of the options have help, usually the advice they give is sensible. Spend a few minutes to think about what you want to do, e.g. use scsi, use ide-cd, use usb-sticks (depends on scsi), use a parallel or usb printer (CONFIG_PARPORT_1284 under parallel port if you want to use most modern printers), use framebuffers, use drm with X, use sound. Then look to make sure you have covered all of the uses you thought of. You won't get it perfect the first time, so save the .config somewhere, e.g. as config-2.6.10-as6-1 [ I'm assuming you'll be running 2.6.10 with the last -as6 security patches ] and set the EXTRAVERSION in the Makefile to something unique (e.g. -1, -2, ...) so that you don't overwrite incompatible modules if you reinstall. Build, install (ideally, do this on the HOST system before building LFS) and make sure you keep the previous kernel images AND keep them in the bootloader menu (grub.conf, I guess) so that you have fallback positions. Then boot it and see how well it works - does it boot (if not, probably wrong CPU specified), does it get to a login prompt (errors might mean you made a mistake in the config file for the boot loader, e.g. root=, or omitted certain things you need). After that, test the functionality - it's a lot easier to test things when you've got all of the packages supplied by a host system. If you rebuild a kernel several times, as well as altering the EXTRAVERSION you should probably do a 'make mrproper' (this deletes the .config); copy your saved config file to .config ; make oldconfig ; make menuconfig ; and then save the new config again. Ken -- das eine Mal als Trag�die, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
