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Monday December 20, 2004

Linux kernels!

Well, I had to bite the bullet today and reconfigure a Linux kernel for the first time. My laptop CD drive is an oddly complicated firewire device and isn't picked up by default in JDS.

I'm still not convinced this is for the faint hearted, but I did find a jolly handy 'HOWTO' on the net which helped enormously. Click

Interestly I discovered that there is a whole bunch of stuff in the kernel switched on by default that you probably wont need and a lot of scope for optimisation too. The distribution we use for JDS (Suse as I'm sure you know) is very generic, obviously to support as wide a variety of machines as possible, so I guess this isn't much of a surprise really.

Certainly perked up the speed of my laptop once I'd unloaded some of the stuff and selected the appropriate processor optimization.

Wireless access is my next hurdle...!

( Dec 20 2004, 01:27:05 PM GMT / Dec 20 2004, 01:27:05 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/linux_kernels

Comments:

One of my biggest criticisms of Linux is the kernel rebuild process. A bit like SunOS 4.x days, if anyone remembers those. As a kid right out of college, and just starting at Sun, I felt really empowered to be able to tweak and build the SunOS kernel the way I wanted. Now its just a nuisance. I think I read from Bill Joy not so recently when asked about the Linux kernel, to which he said something like "Why would I be interested in something I did 20 years ago."

Posted by Watt on December 21, 2004 at 06:09 AM GMT #