Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about systemd logging
On Thursday 10 January 2013, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 5:12 AM, Robin Atwood robin.atw...@attglobal.net wrote: I have temporarily shelved my problem with mounting since my work-around seems adequate. But I have some questions about logging. Journald works fine but what am I supposed to see on the main console? What do you mean by main console? tty1? tty12? /dev/console? All I can see is a few kernel messages which cease after the lvm service completes. There are no service starting messages and no login prompt appears. The other ttys have a banner and prompt as usual. systemd by default only spawns 1 (one) tty, tty1: $ ls /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/ getty@tty1.service That's the only login prompt spawned by default. The other virtual consoles get spawned automatically if you switch to them. In other words, if you never switch to the virtual console 2, there is no login prompt there. It will appear until you switch to it. systemd should switch to tty1 and launch getty@tty1.service automatically when the getty.target is reached in the boot process. I'm not really sure what the problem is; if you are concerned by the [ OK ] messages when booting, it is possible that systemd is so fast that you have no chance to see them (that happens in my laptop with a solid state harddrive). Also, if you have a splash (like plymouth), the whole point of the splash is that you don't see said messages. You can see a copy of the boot log in /var/log/boot.log; that it's what you are supposed to see when booting, but if you have a splash you won't, or maybe it will be so fast that you will miss it. Secondly I want to merge the journal into syslog-ng for post-processing. I have the correct syslog-ng service defined and syslog-ng.conf has been modified to use /run/systemd/journald/syslog as a source unix-stream. But I see no systemd messages appearing. In the Gentoo package all the journald.conf statements are commented out, which ones are necessary to do what I want. I have tried the logging_to_syslog/kmsg options but to no effect, but there are many! I switched from syslog-ng to rsyslog around three years ago, and exclusively to the journal some months ago, so this is from memory: 1. You need to link your syslog service unit to /etc/systemd/system/syslog.service; for example: /etc/systemd/system/syslog.service - /usr/lib/systemd/system/syslog-ng.service 2. You need to set LogTarget=syslog (or LogTarget=syslog-or-kmsg) in /etc/systemd/system.conf. You are configuring *systemd* to use a third party syslog; you don't need to configure the journal itself. man 5 systemd.conf man 1 systemd If I recall correctly, that's it. systemd automatically will buffer the early boot messages until your preferred syslog service start, and from that point on it will send the logs to it immediately. Thanks for the tips, now I can get more output to tty1 if I want. I still can't get any systemd messages to syslog-ng, however. A bit of a mystery. Cheers -Robin -- -- Robin Atwood. Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst from Mandalay by Rudyard Kipling --
[gentoo-user] How to get rid of old gcc?
Hi Gentoo users, I just updated gcc from 4.5.4 to 4.6.3, switched compiler version, rebuilt libtool, but emerge --depclean still does not want to remove old gcc. equery list gcc shows both are still installed: [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.5.4:4.5 [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.6.3:4.6 So how can I now remove the old gcc? I checked again Gentoo GCC Upgrade Guide, but did not find a single word about it... Jarry -- ___ This mailbox accepts e-mails only from selected mailing-lists! Everything else is considered to be spam and therefore deleted.
[gentoo-user] Re: LVM hangs at startup
Am 10.01.2013 12:49, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: Does anyone else see boot problems as well? I re-configured my kernel and rebooted ... system stops/waits at Setting up the Logical Volume Manager. OK, turned off box and chose an older kernel to get things running again, but it stops there even with other untouched kernels. Maybe it is related to the latest udev update? Downgraded to udev-196-r1, system boots again. Gotta check what to re-emerge after upgrading to udev-197. S
[gentoo-user] LVM hangs at startup
Does anyone else see boot problems as well? I re-configured my kernel and rebooted ... system stops/waits at Setting up the Logical Volume Manager. OK, turned off box and chose an older kernel to get things running again, but it stops there even with other untouched kernels. Maybe it is related to the latest udev update? Anyone else? Stefan
Re: [gentoo-user] How to get rid of old gcc?
On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Jarry mr.ja...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Gentoo users, I just updated gcc from 4.5.4 to 4.6.3, switched compiler version, rebuilt libtool, but emerge --depclean still does not want to remove old gcc. equery list gcc shows both are still installed: [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.5.4:4.5 [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.6.3:4.6 So how can I now remove the old gcc? I checked again Gentoo GCC Upgrade Guide, but did not find a single word about it... If they are in slots, the newer version won't necessarily obsolete the older version. You can use emerge --depclean -p -v gcc:4.5 to view any remaining dependencies on that slotted version. You can use emerge -C gcc:4.5 to remove only that slot's version of gcc.
Re: [gentoo-user] How to get rid of old gcc?
Am 10.01.2013 19:06, schrieb Paul Hartman: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Jarry mr.ja...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Gentoo users, I just updated gcc from 4.5.4 to 4.6.3, switched compiler version, rebuilt libtool, but emerge --depclean still does not want to remove old gcc. equery list gcc shows both are still installed: [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.5.4:4.5 [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.6.3:4.6 So how can I now remove the old gcc? I checked again Gentoo GCC Upgrade Guide, but did not find a single word about it... If they are in slots, the newer version won't necessarily obsolete the older version. You can use emerge --depclean -p -v gcc:4.5 to view any remaining dependencies on that slotted version. You can use emerge -C gcc:4.5 to remove only that slot's version of gcc. Even better: emerge -av --depclean gcc:4.5 This will unmerge the gcc slot if and only if there is no dependency. My guess is you have sys-devel/gcc:4.5 in your world file and not just sys-devel/gcc and that's the reason why depclean won't clean it up. Regards, Florian Philipp signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How to get rid of old gcc?
On 10-Jan-13 19:21, Florian Philipp wrote: Am 10.01.2013 19:06, schrieb Paul Hartman: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Jarry mr.ja...@gmail.com wrote: I just updated gcc from 4.5.4 to 4.6.3, switched compiler version, rebuilt libtool, but emerge --depclean still does not want to remove old gcc. equery list gcc shows both are still installed: [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.5.4:4.5 [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.6.3:4.6 If they are in slots, the newer version won't necessarily obsolete the older version. You can use emerge --depclean -p -v gcc:4.5 to view any remaining dependencies on that slotted version. You can use emerge -C gcc:4.5 to remove only that slot's version of gcc. Even better: emerge -av --depclean gcc:4.5 This will unmerge the gcc slot if and only if there is no dependency. My guess is you have sys-devel/gcc:4.5 in your world file and not just sys-devel/gcc and that's the reason why depclean won't clean it up. Well, I have *both* sys-devel/gcc *and* sys-devel/gcc:4.5 in /var/lib/portage/world, but how did this happen? I have never put it there! I did not install gcc, I think it came as part of stage3 (system), so why is it suddenly in my world-file? Jarry -- ___ This mailbox accepts e-mails only from selected mailing-lists! Everything else is considered to be spam and therefore deleted.
[gentoo-user] Re: Testing new kernels - saving dumps / strip down kernel options
On 2013-01-08, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: [...] * I remember a thread here where this was discussed already: How do you guys get to your .config for a recent kernel? make oldconfig doesn't always work out best, I recall? My kernel config is maintained along for years now and has survived several hardware changes. I don't have any obvious problems but I wonder if I have something in there that is deprecated and might be better thrown out. I don't use anything other than stable code releases from portage, but even then I usually do make oldconfig, followed by a by-hand inspection of the options with make menuconfig, to catch stuff that got through me in make oldconfig, and to see if there's any change in other options that I want to tune. Does it make sense to take the .config from the gentoo install dvd for example and remove all the stuff I don't have? Maybe still too much enabled options in the end. Even then, if you do that and tune the config several times, you'll likely end up with a lighter kernel. Just drop anything you don't need from the device drivers. make allnoconfig as a start? That is probably much better than the config from the install dvd, yes, in fact most of the work coming from an Add-It-All config is that you have to disable many, many entries. allmodconfig ? I'd go with allnoconfig, although if you compile lots of stuff as modules, you can then check lsmod to see what does, in fact, get loaded. I'd be happy to hear your opinions. -- Nuno Silva (aka njsg) http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/
Re: [gentoo-user] How to get rid of old gcc?
Am 10.01.2013 19:39, schrieb Jarry: On 10-Jan-13 19:21, Florian Philipp wrote: Am 10.01.2013 19:06, schrieb Paul Hartman: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Jarry mr.ja...@gmail.com wrote: I just updated gcc from 4.5.4 to 4.6.3, switched compiler version, rebuilt libtool, but emerge --depclean still does not want to remove old gcc. equery list gcc shows both are still installed: [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.5.4:4.5 [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.6.3:4.6 If they are in slots, the newer version won't necessarily obsolete the older version. You can use emerge --depclean -p -v gcc:4.5 to view any remaining dependencies on that slotted version. You can use emerge -C gcc:4.5 to remove only that slot's version of gcc. Even better: emerge -av --depclean gcc:4.5 This will unmerge the gcc slot if and only if there is no dependency. My guess is you have sys-devel/gcc:4.5 in your world file and not just sys-devel/gcc and that's the reason why depclean won't clean it up. Well, I have *both* sys-devel/gcc *and* sys-devel/gcc:4.5 in /var/lib/portage/world, but how did this happen? I have never put it there! I did not install gcc, I think it came as part of stage3 (system), so why is it suddenly in my world-file? Jarry The only thing that comes to mind is that you once did something like `emerge -avu gcc:4.5`. The behavior of -u/--update changed some time ago so that it now adds packages to world if -1/--oneshot is not specified. Regards, Florian Philipp signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How to get rid of old gcc?
On 10-Jan-13 19:54, Florian Philipp wrote: Am 10.01.2013 19:39, schrieb Jarry: On 10-Jan-13 19:21, Florian Philipp wrote: Am 10.01.2013 19:06, schrieb Paul Hartman: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Jarry mr.ja...@gmail.com wrote: I just updated gcc from 4.5.4 to 4.6.3, switched compiler version, rebuilt libtool, but emerge --depclean still does not want to remove old gcc. equery list gcc shows both are still installed: [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.5.4:4.5 [IP-] [ ] sys-devel/gcc-4.6.3:4.6 If they are in slots, the newer version won't necessarily obsolete the older version. You can use emerge --depclean -p -v gcc:4.5 to view any remaining dependencies on that slotted version. You can use emerge -C gcc:4.5 to remove only that slot's version of gcc. Even better: emerge -av --depclean gcc:4.5 This will unmerge the gcc slot if and only if there is no dependency. My guess is you have sys-devel/gcc:4.5 in your world file and not just sys-devel/gcc and that's the reason why depclean won't clean it up. Well, I have *both* sys-devel/gcc *and* sys-devel/gcc:4.5 in /var/lib/portage/world, but how did this happen? I have never put it there! I did not install gcc, I think it came as part of stage3 (system), so why is it suddenly in my world-file? The only thing that comes to mind is that you once did something like `emerge -avu gcc:4.5`. The behavior of -u/--update changed some time ago so that it now adds packages to world if -1/--oneshot is not specified. Maybe time to update Gentoo GCC Upgrade Guide. There is nothing about this. I just followed it and did only emerge -u gcc... Anyway my problem is now solved. Thanks to all who replied. Jarry -- ___ This mailbox accepts e-mails only from selected mailing-lists! Everything else is considered to be spam and therefore deleted.
Re: [Bulk] Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about systemd logging
On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 23:46:29 +0700
Robin Atwood robin.atw...@attglobal.net wrote:
Thanks for the tips, now I can get more output to tty1 if I want. I
still can't get any systemd messages to syslog-ng, however. A bit of
a mystery.
This may be way off as I expect systemd to never shape up to a point
that I will use it, but with a bit of luck this may point you in the
right direction. On Arch systemd avoiders had to change their
syslog-ng.conf to the following to get their logging back.
source src {
unix-dgram(/dev/log);
internal();
file(/proc/kmsg);
};
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: LVM hangs at startup
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451266 udev = crap On 01/10/2013 01:52 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: Am 10.01.2013 12:49, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: Does anyone else see boot problems as well? I re-configured my kernel and rebooted ... system stops/waits at Setting up the Logical Volume Manager. OK, turned off box and chose an older kernel to get things running again, but it stops there even with other untouched kernels. Maybe it is related to the latest udev update? Downgraded to udev-196-r1, system boots again. Gotta check what to re-emerge after upgrading to udev-197. S
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: LVM hangs at startup
Am Donnerstag, 10. Januar 2013, 13:52:58 schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: Am 10.01.2013 12:49, schrieb Stefan G. Weichinger: Does anyone else see boot problems as well? I re-configured my kernel and rebooted ... system stops/waits at Setting up the Logical Volume Manager. OK, turned off box and chose an older kernel to get things running again, but it stops there even with other untouched kernels. Maybe it is related to the latest udev update? Downgraded to udev-196-r1, system boots again. Gotta check what to re-emerge after upgrading to udev-197. S After an `emerge -1 lvm2` my systems were booting again, without downgrading udev. HTH, Sascha
Re: [gentoo-user] PATA vs SATA kernel driver (was: 4 machines - no /dev/cdrom or /dev/dvd anymore)
On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 02:42:30PM -0800, fe...@crowfix.com wrote On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 11:32:03AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Wed, 09 Jan 2013 03:01:57 -0600 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Since this is depreciated, which generally means no longer maintained nitpick The word you want is deprecated. depreciated is something else entirely, it's what your employer does to the book value of your company car over 5 years to get the value down to nothing. /nitpick Depreciated is perfectly cromulent in this instance. You really think it's copacetic? -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] PATA vs SATA kernel driver (was: 4 machines - no /dev/cdrom or /dev/dvd anymore)
On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:41:15 -0500 Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote: On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 02:42:30PM -0800, fe...@crowfix.com wrote On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 11:32:03AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Wed, 09 Jan 2013 03:01:57 -0600 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Since this is depreciated, which generally means no longer maintained nitpick The word you want is deprecated. depreciated is something else entirely, it's what your employer does to the book value of your company car over 5 years to get the value down to nothing. /nitpick Depreciated is perfectly cromulent in this instance. You really think it's copacetic? I never heard of copacetic till now, had to look it up. What a wonderful word, I feel embiggened by it's correctness -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
[gentoo-user] Redux: Any UPS recommendations?
On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 08:01:47AM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote I think my UPS is dying. Time to get a new one. It's been years, so there may be new tech out there I don't know about. My normal usage is * 1 LCD monitor 24 * 1 (sometimes 2) desktop PCs connected to the monitor * 1 ADSL router/modem I got an APC Back-UPS BX1300G-CN from the local Staples. No worry whatsoever about overloading this baby. I'm currently running a torture test with the monitor, the modem, and both PC's running. They're both doing an update. I set things up so that both are building gcc at the same time. Even so, the load indicator is only lighting up 2 of 5 bars, indicating approximately 40% of max load. It might've been a different story years ago back in the days of the Pentium 4 or AMD space heaters, plus add-on video cards. Being the geek that I am, I did RTFM the docs that came with the UPS. It has an option to decide how much to allow voltage to vary before switching over to battery power. I selected the narrowest range, i.e. the sensitive electronics setting. One question about the configuration of apcupsd; what do I have to do get it to execute /usr/sbin/hibernate when hydro is out, and the battery is running low? -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about systemd logging
On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Robin Atwood robin.atw...@attglobal.net wrote: On Thursday 10 January 2013, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 5:12 AM, Robin Atwood robin.atw...@attglobal.net wrote: I have temporarily shelved my problem with mounting since my work-around seems adequate. But I have some questions about logging. Journald works fine but what am I supposed to see on the main console? What do you mean by main console? tty1? tty12? /dev/console? All I can see is a few kernel messages which cease after the lvm service completes. There are no service starting messages and no login prompt appears. The other ttys have a banner and prompt as usual. systemd by default only spawns 1 (one) tty, tty1: $ ls /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/ getty@tty1.service That's the only login prompt spawned by default. The other virtual consoles get spawned automatically if you switch to them. In other words, if you never switch to the virtual console 2, there is no login prompt there. It will appear until you switch to it. systemd should switch to tty1 and launch getty@tty1.service automatically when the getty.target is reached in the boot process. I'm not really sure what the problem is; if you are concerned by the [ OK ] messages when booting, it is possible that systemd is so fast that you have no chance to see them (that happens in my laptop with a solid state harddrive). Also, if you have a splash (like plymouth), the whole point of the splash is that you don't see said messages. You can see a copy of the boot log in /var/log/boot.log; that it's what you are supposed to see when booting, but if you have a splash you won't, or maybe it will be so fast that you will miss it. Secondly I want to merge the journal into syslog-ng for post-processing. I have the correct syslog-ng service defined and syslog-ng.conf has been modified to use /run/systemd/journald/syslog as a source unix-stream. But I see no systemd messages appearing. In the Gentoo package all the journald.conf statements are commented out, which ones are necessary to do what I want. I have tried the logging_to_syslog/kmsg options but to no effect, but there are many! I switched from syslog-ng to rsyslog around three years ago, and exclusively to the journal some months ago, so this is from memory: 1. You need to link your syslog service unit to /etc/systemd/system/syslog.service; for example: /etc/systemd/system/syslog.service - /usr/lib/systemd/system/syslog-ng.service 2. You need to set LogTarget=syslog (or LogTarget=syslog-or-kmsg) in /etc/systemd/system.conf. You are configuring *systemd* to use a third party syslog; you don't need to configure the journal itself. man 5 systemd.conf man 1 systemd If I recall correctly, that's it. systemd automatically will buffer the early boot messages until your preferred syslog service start, and from that point on it will send the logs to it immediately. Thanks for the tips, now I can get more output to tty1 if I want. I still can't get any systemd messages to syslog-ng, however. A bit of a mystery. Stupid question, the syslog-ng.service is running correctly? What does the following command say: systemctl status syslog-ng.service Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
[gentoo-user] pgo not selected for firefox 18
17 compiled with pgo but in the emerge output for 18 it shows as (-pgo).
pgo is selected in make.conf, and in the ebuild;
DEPEND=${RDEPEND}
dev-python/pysqlite
virtual/pkgconfig
pgo? (
=dev-lang/python-2*[sqlite]
=sys-devel/gcc-4.5 )
amd64? ( ${ASM_DEPEND}
virtual/opengl )
x86? ( ${ASM_DEPEND}
virtual/opengl )
And I have python 2 built with sqlite and gcc 4.7.2. Why is pgo not enabled?
Re: [gentoo-user] pgo not selected for firefox 18
On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Adam Carter adamcart...@gmail.com wrote:
17 compiled with pgo but in the emerge output for 18 it shows as (-pgo). pgo
is selected in make.conf, and in the ebuild;
DEPEND=${RDEPEND}
dev-python/pysqlite
virtual/pkgconfig
pgo? (
=dev-lang/python-2*[sqlite]
=sys-devel/gcc-4.5 )
amd64? ( ${ASM_DEPEND}
virtual/opengl )
x86? ( ${ASM_DEPEND}
virtual/opengl )
And I have python 2 built with sqlite and gcc 4.7.2. Why is pgo not enabled?
I had noticed it a while ago, it appears to be hardmasked:
# Jory A. Pratt anar...@gentoo.org (15 Dec 2012)
# PGO is known to be busted with most configurations
www-client/firefox pgo
I never had a single problem with it, so I'm going to unmask it and
see if anything breaks.
Re: [gentoo-user] Testing new kernels - saving dumps / strip down kernel options
On 8 January 2013, at 12:14, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: … * I remember a thread here where this was discussed already: How do you guys get to your .config for a recent kernel? make oldconfig doesn't always work out best, I recall? My kernel config is maintained along for years now and has survived several hardware changes. I don't have any obvious problems but I wonder if I have something in there that is deprecated and might be better thrown out. Does it make sense to take the .config from the gentoo install dvd for example and remove all the stuff I don't have? I most always take the .config from a recent systemrescuecd and it has always worked well for me. I change processor type and features and disable the initrd. There may be some stuff on a LiveCD based distro which is optimised for running off an optical disk, so I guess a RedHat or Ubuntu default .config might be better. These should provide everything you need to boot, and most everything else as modules, which will be automatically loaded. IMO this is pretty much optimal. The engineers at RedHat and Ubuntu know a heck of a lot more about kernels than I do. One might be able to make one's kernel milliseconds more efficient by tuning it by hand, but it will surely take hours of tinkering to attain that. I do not believe you can properly understand the consequences of any given kernel option merely by reading the one- or two-line description in makeconfig's help. To *properly* customise a kernel for oneself will take more research than that, I reckon. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: LVM hangs at startup
Am 10.01.2013 22:31, schrieb Sascha Cunz: After an `emerge -1 lvm2` my systems were booting again, without downgrading udev. Yep, I confirm this. Anything else to recompile maybe? thx, Stefan
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Testing new kernels - saving dumps / strip down kernel options
Am 10.01.2013 10:38, schrieb Nuno J. Silva: Even then, if you do that and tune the config several times, you'll likely end up with a lighter kernel. Just drop anything you don't need from the device drivers. make allnoconfig as a start? That is probably much better than the config from the install dvd, yes, in fact most of the work coming from an Add-It-All config is that you have to disable many, many entries. I tried with a .config from the live cd, just to see where it gets me. Disabled loads of stuff, enabled options I need for my hardware and for running KVM here. This cut my .config from ~76k down to 71k already, and the kernel itself got smaller as well: # the backup from old .config 2,5M 10. Jan 11:52 initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-3.7.1-gentoo 3,3M 10. Jan 11:52 kernel-genkernel-x86_64-3.7.1-gentoo 2,0M 10. Jan 11:52 System.map-genkernel-x86_64-3.7.1-gentoo # the new one 2,5M 10. Jan 13:53 initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-3.7.1-gentoo 2,7M 10. Jan 13:52 kernel-genkernel-x86_64-3.7.1-gentoo 2,1M 10. Jan 13:52 System.map-genkernel-x86_64-3.7.1-gentoo nice so far, without much work to do. Everything works so far, so ok ... I might try the allnoconfig-approach as well, sure! Stefan
Re: [gentoo-user] Testing new kernels - saving dumps / strip down kernel options
Am 11.01.2013 07:28, schrieb Stroller: I most always take the .config from a recent systemrescuecd and it has always worked well for me. I change processor type and features and disable the initrd. What to choose for a i7-2600 ... ? There may be some stuff on a LiveCD based distro which is optimised for running off an optical disk, so I guess a RedHat or Ubuntu default .config might be better. Ah, ok, might be. I took one from gentoo as I assumed the config might fit the gentoo-sources better somehow (although I still don't know what patches are applied to vanilla-sources to get gentoo-sources ... I just thought the config might somehow make use of those changes). These should provide everything you need to boot, and most everything else as modules, which will be automatically loaded. IMO this is pretty much optimal. The engineers at RedHat and Ubuntu know a heck of a lot more about kernels than I do. One might be able to make one's kernel milliseconds more efficient by tuning it by hand, but it will surely take hours of tinkering to attain that. I do not believe you can properly understand the consequences of any given kernel option merely by reading the one- or two-line description in makeconfig's help. To *properly* customise a kernel for oneself will take more research than that, I reckon. Yep. I don't look for those last milliseconds, I just want to get rid of some old stuff I might drag along for years already ... Thanks, Stefan
