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Linux Software

Helping Linux Newbies Move to the Next Level 79

Posted by Roblimo from the everybody-starts-somewhere dept.
NoWhere Man writes "PCWorld has a "here's how" article on how to get the most out of your Linux box. It's basically a very extensive and userfriendly step-by-step instruction on how to recompile your kernel to make it smaller and more compact." Kernel recompilation and optimization is old hat for experienced Linux people, but articles like this, especially in "non-Linux" publications, are necessary to help new Linux users become more adept. Kudos to PCWorld for running it!
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Helping Linux Newbies Move to the Next Level More

Helping Linux Newbies Move to the Next Level

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  • This may be flamebait, /. being bit Linux-oriented, but why in gods' name cannot Linux adopt boot loader scheme like that of *BSDs? I haven't had any need for moving away from GENERIC kernels on OpenBSD :P

    Linux would be definitely easier to use if you could just have "massive" kernel, without modules, IMNSHO.

  • What *are* you talking about? Feel free to compile a monolithic kernel on Linux, it works fine. If you want more than one, use LILO. It's a bootloader, that's what it's there for...

    Having modules just means that you save a little memory, and don't have to reboot or recompile to support new hardware. That's why distributions use them. It isn't for speed, it's just more flexible.

    And on the "flamebait" topic... I'd move away from OpenBSD in general, just on moral grounds. I'm amazed at all the positive press it's gotten, since it should be known as "the OS by and for 31337 d00dz", with Theo at the helm.... :)
    ---
    pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
  • > Linux would be definitely easier to use if you
    > could just have "massive" kernel, without
    > modules, IMNSHO

    I'm not sure what you mean by this. How would everyday usage of Linux become easier with a monolithic kernel?

    As for Linux adopting a monolithic kernel like the BSDs, the modularity of the Linux kernel was definitely a design feature, not an accident. By allowing you to load modules dynamically, you can keep the size of the kernel down (and extra complexity out of the kernel). If you really want, you could always recompile a kernel with _everything_ enabled.

    I could be wrong, but I think that is what the generic kernels are for BSD. I know with OpenBSD one of the first things they recommend (man afterboot [openbsd.org]) is to recompile a kernel with only what you need.

    Just my $.02

    - Haplo
  • Let it be known to all Linux newbies that recompiling your kernel is just one part of many things you need to know. It is a very good thing to master, as is security.

    I think another good idea for an article is "Not running all those unneccisary services."

    This falls along the same lines of not having a bunch of un-needed crap in your kernel, and also takes care of some security issues.

    Oh, by the way, lets not flame Linux newbies please. If there weren't newbies, there wouldn't be this huge crowd of Linux users.

    Tyler
  • Recently a fairly young Windows user that I know wanted to install Linux on his 486 that he had laying around. I am quite happy to help new users if they need anything, but this kid could not understand that if you just read the documentation that comes with the distrobution, 9 times out of 10 you will be able to find what you need to accomplish your specific goal. I was bombarded with questions about how to configure this or that and even before that questions about the install procedure (even after telling him several times what it is like and to just go ahead with it). My point is some people, no matter how clearly spelled out something might be, cannot handle not having the computer do the work for you. I see it sort of like cars, the OS is the engine and the car is the PC. If the engine is already installed and the user learns to drive the car, everything is fine. Having a novice install a new engine however is a different case. Same thing with Linux or windows: a user who learns to use a computer which already has linux installed would do fine eventually. Perhaps what should happen is there should be a distiction between a box with power in it, where knowledge is required to run it and basically an idiot box which does not require knowledge and things like OS or command lines etc are not a concern.

    If this makes any sense, I am glad... its 4 AM and I can't sleep so take that in mind.

    _joshua_
  • Massive kernels are well and good for simplicity, but in the case of evolving drivers, they're very bad... the linux SBlive drivers are as of yet *very* immature, imho... I still get some skipping where I've never had problems before with either my old ensonique 1371 or older isa cards.. if I didn't have modules, I'd not be having fun atm.

    But, you can have it either way... it's nice to have a choice, imho. Thou do agree that the article probably shouln't have mentioned modules without going a bit more in-depth about them... "make modules; make modules_install" isn't enough after you recompile a new kernel if you're a newbie, imho. Guess they're counting on RH's gui stuff to allow for configuring/loading module, thou as I don't use RH, that's just a guess.
  • My point was, monolithic kernels on Linux, at least on i386, _DO_NOT_WORK_. You _have_ to fuck around with modules, or alternatively "learn to compile your own kernel". I consider neither good approaches for the "Linux Newbies", and therefore _working_ i386 monolithic kernels would remove one confusing section from most "Linux for dummies" books, that is, the kernel compilation/installation part.

    Even as non-newbie, I've had great deal of pain dealing with some-modules-that-do-not-work-as-modules, and the damned 640k/1M boundaries the current loading architecture sets for the "monolithic" kernel.

    Example: My current kernel is 613kb[1]. I cannot even include ext3fs for root device purposes to it without hitting some mystic boundary (make bzImage works; after boot, it says "out of memory". huh).

    [1] ext2+nfs+reiserfs fs:es, couple of network card drivers - almost all irrelevant is done via modules. reiserfs-as-module did not work, nor did nfs-as-module at most recent try. And yes, this is frigging "stable" branch.

  • Well, the article describes the process fairly well, that is a way to recompile the linux kernel. But it isn't enough to go through the steps with no understanding of what you're doing.

    Maybe if you know what your hardware is, you can take out a few options, and end up with less total modules compiled and installed, and you'll end up with a leaner system. As in, Ooo, I just saved 10MB of valuable disk space. Big deal. You could have done that using 'rm' on some useless modules.

    Maybe if you knew what you were doing, you could compile in something you always plan to be using as part of the kernel instead of as a module, and get some speed out of it instead. And maybe if you really knew something about egcs, you could change those silly default compiler options to something useful (-fno-strength-reduce often isn't necessary anymore, I hope!) and get some more performance gains. But this article wasn't about that.

    Nope, to get any real speed-up in the kernel, you'd have to already know something, and this article assumes you don't. Why make newbies go through this process when it won't help them any? Either document the whole thing for those who *really* want to learn, or don't bother. But don't confuse the people you're trying to convert. They don't know -ffast-math from xcalc.
    ---
    pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
  • I'm amazed to see this on PC World. They must perceive some sort of demand among their generic Win32 users for basic Linux installation help.

    On a related note, has anybody seen that new magazine Maximum Linux? In my opinion it was nothing as good as it's parent Maximum PC. Some articles were Okay, but the interview was godawful dull, and a lot of the writing was pure palaver. One would expect more from them.

  • At the very least, I'm with you on the 4am/no sleep thing.


    W

  • idea for a Linux help site (Score:3)

    by semis ( 14252 ) on Sunday November 14, 1999 @10:04PM (#1533345) Homepage
    This might the appropriate topic to create a thread of comments/suggestions/ideas regarding a Linux help site that I want to start up. If this is the wrong place to do so, then I apologise.

    The design of this site would be centered around "users helping users". Those who feel adept in helping newbies could sign up as "helpers", where their particular skills and areas of expertise would be kept track of. Newbies in need of help could then fill in a form requesting for help, from which the system would match their particular problem with a suitable "helper" - who would be emailed their information.

    Of course, to remove common questions, users would be taken through maybe some kind of Wizard (ick I hate that word :P) which would recommend certain HOWTO's/FAQ's based on their problem, before allowing them to submit a help request.

    In effect, what would be created would be a large scale "help desk" system - however free for people to use.

    The incentive for people to become "helpers" would be simple - the best helpers each month (derived from positive feedback from users) would revieve free hardware/software from sponsors of the site. I'm thinking people like VA, PenguinComputing, and Redhat could be suitable "sponsors".

    Help requests and solutions would be recorded and put in some kind of Linux help knowledge base, which would be free to search.

    I have confidence that (once above the ground) such a help system would really benefit the Linux community.

    A) People could get personal help with their problems
    B) Those who help would be rewarded from sponsors
    C) Sponsors get exposure
    D) People might feel easier about learning Linux is they knew a free help system existed.

    Well, I hope that gives you guys enough of an idea as to what I would like to see. I am eager for constructive critisism/ideas/comments/questions for this idea.

    cheers,
    semis.

  • What's this "one wrong move may render the linux side of your machine inoperable"?

    That's a huge assumption they're making, that anyone who uses linux is so attached to windows that he can't do without a windows "side". I almost offended.

    If Linux is only one "side" of my box, I have a pretty darn lopsided box :-)

    But seriously, I have to take the time to say: 99% of the time, anyone who dual boots will never really learn linux. Things are easy to do in windows when that's what one's been brought up with. Until someone decides to take the plunge and go all linux, i would bet money that person is never going to do more than dabble in it. That's the way it was with me.

    Jeremy
  • I come across this problem a *lot* with Macintosh users. Most seem to assume that you can use the system forever without ever removing extensions, or running a disk utility, or rebuilding the desktop file.

    But the plain truth is that OSes require maintainence. Some more than others, of course. (As I recall, there still are no disk utilities for BeOS, simply because the problem hasn't come up yet.) Anyway, nothing is worse than a computer-lab Mac with 400 extensions in it and a disk fragmented to hell, and the user asks, "Why does it crash?" It would be like a motorist asking, "Why won't it go?" after failing to change the oil for 8000 miles.

    Anyway. Eventually we'll get to the stage where no OSes ever require maintainence, or we'll get to the point where computer users are smart enough to realize that they do, and stop expecting miracles.

    Now moderate me down for being off-topic, and off-OS. :)

    - James Schend

  • I remember being quite lost when I started using Linux. Recompiling the kernel for the first time scared the hell outta me. (It would've been better had I known about 'make menuconfig' or even 'make xconfig', which this article covers.) I definitely agree this sort of article is needed, even though the requisite information is doubtless available from already existing sources (like the linux/Documentation directory).

    There are a few points which could've definitely used improvement. For one thing, the article's quite biased toward Red Hat. Understandable, as it's a choice for many who are new to Linux, but still there could be mention of other ways of doing things--to satisfy curious gurus-to-be, at the very least.

    Along the lines of edification, perhaps some more detail could have been given for the hows and wherefores of using certain commands. Since this article seemed to use RH as a basis, perhaps some explanation on what exactly that ugly rpm command was doing would be in order. To their credit, though, they did have links to related articles.

    Finally, I think some newbies could benefit from information on gathering more information for themselves about the Linux kernel--further reading, to be specific. Every kernel hacker starts somewhere, and a mention of the linux/Documentation directory (at the very least) would be helpful to those wishing to learn the art.

    Thanks to PCWorld for this article--though it might not explain everything, at the very least it can help with the intimidating process of customizing one's kernel.

  • Heh. We'd better get to the point where no OSes ever require maintenance, because we'll never get the users to stop expecting miracles.

    However, I'm proud that I can defragment my linux drives, but it really doesn't help that much. And proud that it's faster to defragment a DOS drive under DOSEmu/Linux as opposed to just doing it in DOS. :)

    Always remember that all operating systems suck, but for some purposes, some operating systems suck less than others, sometimes vastly so...
    ---
    pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
  • Damn good idea - its already happening though....
    http://www.linuxnewbe.org
    & sevral others that IMHO aren't as good....
  • When I dual booted for the first 9 months of my Linux experience, I learned more and more Linux as I went, as well as spending more and more time in Linux. Eventually, I just realized that I no longer needed Windoze for anything. So I think I would disagree with your statement, b/c I learned a lot during that time, a lot more than just 'tinkering'.
  • Oops, I didn't mean to AC that post.....

  • Maxixmum Linux.....
    Was their article on Compiling as good, & what about the article by Mae Ling Mak (pictures?)
    The damn thing costs NZ$ 24.95, is very thin & comes in a plastic bag - so I haven't read it yet.
    Comp mags always seem out of date compared to what's on the net IMHO - usually the only reason I get them is for coverdisks, & I already run MDK 6.1.....
  • Well, not *that* good article. If they give instructions like that, why don't they give generic ones? I stopped reading when they suggested making a bootdisk with "mkbootdisk".

    I assume this is a Redhat app? Well, I don't care, I was running Redhat myself, now Mandrake, but they should have given instructions that work for everyone, e.g.

    dd if=/whaterverkernel of=/dev/fd0
    rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/(root partition)
    rdev -R /dev/fd0 1

    Or am I too picky here? I mean, okay, I learned something, I didn't know that my Linux would provide a "mkbootdisk", but many people not using Redhat would fail at that point.

  • Interesting article (I find it useful actually because I'm just showing a Linux newbie around and I really don't feel like explaining every single thing to him. Often one doesn't know where to start though :).

    I found it a little sad that it was rather Red Hat-biased at some points (like talking about installing the new kernel using RPM). I wonder though, how easy it for authors of articles such as this one to make their articles fully independent from any distribution specifics. It's rather sad to see how many articles talk about "Linux" in the header but when you look at the article itself are really about "Distribution XYZ". :/. Ah well, I guess that's the cost one pays for having all these distros flying around.

  • I'm relatively new to Linux but I'm not new to computers and I can tell you that the last thing a person, any person, should have to do is recompile any kind of code to get something working. Just because you can recompile the kernel doesn't mean it's desirable. In fact, it's a boring hassle.

    I, for one, am pretty sick of all the fiddling that has to go on to get something working in Linux, Windoze or any other OS I've seen.

    Is anything better possible?

  • I used to be like the person you describe. I had a "mentor" helping me to learn Linux. Sometimes, however, he would get this frustrated attitude and I gradually asked fewer and fewer questions and began seeking the answers myself. I am so thankful that I made this transition (I'm also very thankful he took the time to help me at all) as now I am much more of a "do-it-yourselfer" than before. BUT, I do think those who are more experienced, need to be a little more patient because obviously some learn at faster rates than others. Some people may never "get it" but, everyone who genuinely wants to learn should be given a good, honest chance. That is, of course, if you are willing to help "newbies." We should all remember where we came from when someone asks for help. At one time we were all "newbies."

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • It wasn't so scary for me the first couple of times... but then again, there was nothing like menuconfig or xconfig out yet when I was learning this stuff. I had installed SLS linux on my massive 100mb hard drive, and I used it because it made my computer as useful as the HP/UX cluster I normally dialed into via a long distance call.... ahh.... the good old days... nothing like downloading an entire distro over a 2400bps modem link. I did it.
  • This is good to see. It was only last week that I was trying to take a Linux newbie through the kernel compilation experience on IRC. Now I have a great URL that I can get him to RTFM... :)
  • Throw out all your computers and buy a pig farm.
  • If you can manage to code it yes. But remember computers are sick tempermental bastards and the day something works just like that all the time is the day humans arn't using them.

    Face it, computers arn't the simple things flashy advertising would have you believe, and a certain amount of tampering will always be required.

    However, things are much better than they used to be, SO STOP COMPLAINING! You can compile a linux kernel in 15 min at the most on a modern machine (and that is conservative), go and have a coffee while you wait. Back in the good old days, compiling a kernel took hours and we were glad to do it :-). If you can't stand compiling your own kernel, DON'T. All distributions have modules for all the extra cards and devices you use, even slackware.

    Compiling you own kernel is completely optional. The fact that an article mentions how to do it doesn't mean you have to. Feel free to moderate this blatent flame in any direction you wan't it.
  • Okay, this may very well be a nice set of
    instructions for recompiling your kernel,
    but the stated reasons for doing so strike
    me as completely insane. The idea that you're
    going to get some kind of noticeable performance
    boost by tuning up your kernel is pretty
    ridiculous. You've really got to have some
    pretty specific needs to want to do this.

    Me, I recompile my kernels to include support
    for an old SCSI card, and I'm actually
    beginning think that even this is nutty:
    I should just replace the damn card with
    something supported by default.
  • This article is just like the typical "How to optimise Windows" articles.

    It assumes that all you can do to an OS is optimise bits of it and that the "power" of Linux is simply it's speed. The benefits of doing what this article suggests are negligible. The only real reason for users to do this is to fix bugs.
    At *best* this article is dangerous; It tells users to change the default linux entry in lilo.conf rather than add an additional entry.

    They'd be much better focusing on how to use things like cron and shell scripting.
  • While I don't agree with every detail mentioned in the article, it could have been much worse. Given they only have limited space to explain things, they did a decent job.

    They are a bit braver than I though. If I compile a new kernel, I first copy the kernel to a floppy disk, boot from the floppy disk, check if the important things still appear to work (vi, ppp, telnet, perl, mail, and news - nothing else is really important) and only then I tell lilo about the job I did.

    -- Abigail

  • Just the Linux side?

    For the record, you can make "all your sides" inoperable by recompiling the kernel and running LILO, in case you're booting the other operating systems from LILO. If you've screwed something up in LILO configuration, chances are that you'll get some LILO error codes on your screen instead of that nice boot prompt.. I've seen this happen quite many times..

    Having a bootdisk is a Good Thing(tm).

  • Except for the most gifted among us, we needed someone or something to help us learn about computing at some point. I entered college after being exposed to limited nubers of computers from the verneable apple 2/e, to PS/1 and 2, to wfw over IBM LAN MAN 1.0 and finally win 95. When registering for computing accounts here at the University of Kentucky there was an option for SAC, the HP-UX box were I cut my teeth on *NX. I spent most of my X-mas break in 1997 trying to figure out what the hell chmod was for my web directory, and slowly but surely I gained the resources to develop web content. I have tried to share that knowledge to others since then to those willing to learn, which further advances computing. We do not need to set up a TECHNOCRACY, as helpful as it may be to some of our goals. So cut that AOheLl user some slack, it could be your mom!!!

  • I thought MaximumLinux was a good way to expose what Linux is to the masses. When I saw a magazine on the rack devoted entirely to Linux and published by the same people as MaximumPC(my personal fav) my expectations were pretty high, and I wasn't exactly disappointed. And as a "newbie" I didn't really learn much from the issue directly, but it definitely pointed me in the right direction in many areas. Heck, before reading that issue I had never heard of /. This isn't strictly a tech mag as much as it is a wide variety of all things Linux. I thought it was a pretty good premiere, and we'll have to wait till they have things a little more established before we condemn them. The thought of 650 megs of free software every 2 months, without the countless hours of downloading, is enough to keep me excited.

  • The kernels that come with the OS by default are configured for maximum compatability, which is smart, because they are going to be used on a wide variety of different machines. Often with the broad compatability comes a lack of optimisation, ie the kernel is compiled for 386's, has patches for obscure chipsets you might not have etc.

    If you're running a n-86, why not run with n-86 optimisations? Often recompiling can give a substantial boost to some applications, the X screensavers that are heavily FPU intensive, for instance.
  • First let me start of by saying that I am a "newbie" (though fairly intelligent.) Yes wizard is a bad, bad word. I don't think you should rely too heavilly on HOWTO's/FAQ's. While they can most times answer really basic questions, individual hardware configurations can create obstacles (like my damn Winmodem and Voodoo2 card!) While these kinds of problems can be worked around and remedied no HOWTO or FAQ can really cover that kind of scope. Sure I can get Glide for Linux and a very good 3dfx Howto to go with it, but that was greatly complicated by the fact that I had to download it with IE in Win98 and then copy to my Linux drive. Though I figured it all out on my own (and learned a good deal in the process) an actual person to whom I could ask questions would have been a great help. And I know what you're thinking: why don't I just buy a real modem? I'm cheap, ok.
  • I'm amazed to see this on PC World. They must perceive some sort of demand among their generic Win32 users for basic Linux installation help.

    While on a general basis I agree this is a Good Thing, it's sad to find out this is distribution specific. What's worse are things like:

    Keeping in mind that the Linux command line is case-sensitive, start the discovery process by typing:


    rpm -q kernel [...]

    Whew! This command tells Linux [...]

    (strong emphasis mine) Linux? Linux!?!? it's rpm, and it's rpm taking a look at its own database and telling you what is in there. I read a few mailing lists where newbies ask questions, and I do read them because of that... on one hand, I like to help people that are starting with Linux... I don't do hand holding, I just explain things to them, give them enough information so they can find the answers by themselves, this helps them and it also helps me to get less RTFM type of questions. On the other hand, it helps me spot flaws and problems in my favorite distro, so adding all up, I get something out of it, they get something out of it, and many other people get something out of it... but I do get sick of two things:

    • Linux == whatever distro statements. This is the media's fault, or to put it in another way, uninformed technical journalists that make statements like the one I quoted...
    • too much and not enough information questions. This is probably Fate's way of reminding me of my tech-support days... "let me explain it for the nth time: the fact that you can't list the contents of /etc/shadow as a normal user is not related to the fact that you are running kernel version one gazillion and a half, got it?"

    This is also "funny", to say the least:

    The version numbers you see here correspond to version 6.1 of the Red Hat distribution; if you have another version, then different numbers will appear.
    That's no problem.

    That's no problem? Well, it can be a problem... not likely with "recent" versions of RH, but I know some people that like pre 6.0 versions of RH better, and they recommend those pre 6.0 versions to newbies, which means there are cases where it might be a problem.

  • Yes I'm a "newbie"
    Yes I dual boot
    Yes I still have that damn Winmodem
    Though I use Windows less and less it will be a long time before i get rid of it completely. Why?
    1. X-wing VS Tie-Fighter
    2. Jedi Knight: Dark Forces2
    3. Rougue Squadron
    4. Pod Racer
    Mr. Lucas, if you or one of your lackies (ewoks, droids, whatever) are reading this beware the MicroDark side!

  • I used this article...... (Score:3)

    by m3000 ( 46427 ) on Monday November 15, 1999 @12:56AM (#1533374)
    As a Linux newbie, I first saw this article on linux.com on Saturday. It has proved VERY helpful. I had tried to recompile/compile kernels before, but I had always gotten errors, or something went wrong. But, I had finally recompiled my kernel on Saturday night (he, 16 and compiling a kernel on a Saturday night, scary :-) and with that success, I tried to compile the latest kernel. Unfortunatly, I still haven't gotten that to work because at bootup, it says VFS is unable to mount the root fs. I'm not sure what's wrong, but it's fun to try to figure it out. Anyway, I really liked this article, and found it extremely helpful.
  • Well, then you were lazier than me. I've been dual booting for over a year, and I'm studying CS and most certainly don't "just dabble" with it. Heck, I recently did my first modification of kernel source code (OK, it was a trivial one).

    I'd never use Windows to do serious work, but you just cant live without it, as long as there is hardware that has no Linux drivers (e.g. parlallel port scanners, DVD decoder card. I don't have the money for an SCSI scanner or the Linux-based DVD decoder), and no good movie players, as well as a lot of other stuff.

  • I noticed some errors in the article.

    typing tar filename.tar.gz isn't going to do anything but give you a bunch of error messages.

    You don't need to go and have a snack while you are compiling your kernel. Linux is a multitasking operating system. You can do something else while the kernel compile is going on. Why do you have to shut everything down first. Fine, if you're really really low on memory, getting out of star office and X will speed up your kernel compile, but if you've got enough memory (64MB) then it won't make that much difference.

  • Hmmm...

    And I just were going to flame it. Well, your message stopped me ;-)

    Anyway, kernel recompilation is one of the best documented procedures. You just have to read (not so big) docs and try to understand what you do. It's a vital procedure after all.

    I recall, that I had my own kernel version running the next day I installed Linux thingie a couple of years ago. And I had *zero* background in Linux and UNIX in general. It's not that hard at all - other problems will be trickier ;-)

  • One thing people forget: All of us have a limit to how much information we can take in at any one time. I'm not a professional tech-support person but I have had to work problems over the phone with computer-owning relatives (complete with screaming kids in the background!) If you've been that person and a disembodied voice over the phone is giving you a series of instructions, the omission of any one of which will hose your system, perhaps you'll see the problem.

    And even when one RTFMs, it never seems enough. I am a new Linux user and I have spent the past month reading about Linux, picking a distribution (or two), installing it and RTFM again and again to get all my stuff working.

    I'm an experienced computer user (20 years) with a CS degree and I was (and am) still impressed with all the endless minutae one has to know to get Linux running. Sometimes, I think Linux embodies hard work for its own sake, and many (weak-minded) people in the outside world embrace that philosophy.

    And "RTFM All The Way" is a good philosophy only if the M's are all perfect and tell you all you need to know. For example, I have two SCSI controllers in my system. Neither of them are set up, though I've low-level drivers for both of them. There is no HOWTO for setting up SCSI, only the SCSI Programming HOWTO.

    What I've been able to learn about Linux SCSI comes from little bits and pieces, notably the source code for one of my drivers (an NCR53C400, my scanner's card; an AHA152x is the other.)

    Source code? I am a geek and have read source code in various languages for years. But really. That's end-user documentation? Please.

    I now know what address to feed the NCR driver, but I still don't know how to take Linux by the hand and say, "See! There's your SCSI controllers! Old, maybe, but they work!"

    I suppose if I work on it in my spare time for 10 years, I may get a gold star.

    Take care,
    Dave

  • I didn't read the article extremely carefully (I already know how to compile a kernel), but was there any mention about copying over the system map? If this isn't done, sometimes the results can be very bad.
  • hey the only reason i have windows if for the games. I am still a newbie but i have not booted winblows for over a month now. Once ive learned something in linux i no longer do it in windows. So hey all you programmers start making some games. get together with your freinds and make some good games for linux. Not just asteroids and others but serious clones of games like warcraft and others.
  • that they put Linux oriented "how-to" articles in, that can only boost circulation (and also how much they can charge for adverts) - there will probably always a vocal minority of people, a 'niche' market, of folks who love to 'do it yourself', like home depot weekend carpenters - why spend a lot of time getting blueprints, buying lumber, pouring 'crete, etc to build a back deck yourself (Linux) when you can just pay an experienced contractor to do it for you (Windows)? Because you can! Some folks have the time and talent and looking for a tech challenge. There will always be a minority of people who love to learn by experimenting and trying things out, exploring (colloquially called 'hacking'). Anyway, the point is there WILL be people who get their Linux up and running and will be jonsing for articles and software to feed it.

    Chuck
  • It's unfortunate that marketing has produced a breed of wannabe's that have no idea how to make a real OS function. Point and click...that's all they know.
  • The help in the kernsl is not always that helpful and in some cases it is not there. There are a few things that I am not sure that I need to compile in my kernel and I have been doing useing Linux for years. To really do a good job at optimizing the kernel one must really know there hardware and what they do and don't need. This is difficult for many including myself and I feel pretty confident at knowing a bit more than the average user about harware.

    Consider a users that doesn't know the difference between RAM ROM and hd space: doi you really think it is a good idea for someone like that to compile a kernel?

    send flames > /dev/null

  • It would have been nice had they explained you can add another LILO entry for your "new" kernel while leaving the old entry... then you can boot into either the "new" or "old" one. (Of course, having a boot disk is still a reasonable precaution.)
  • It would have been nice had they explained you can add another LILO entry for your "new" kernel while leaving the old entry

    That was my first reaction as well. But then I realized they were assuming the reader was unfamiliar with a text editor. Given the limited amount of space, I don't think there was enough room to explain both which lines you would need to copy and how to do that. Of course, you might wonder how sane it is for someone not knowing a text editor to configure and compile kernels....

    -- Abigail

  • The best way to get newbies to the next level is to keep them using it after college. All the evidence points to very transient usage. They pick it up in college and give it up when they start working so we have a user base which is primarily interested in starting the basic operating system and trying out different distributions but rarely getting to the point of actually doing anything with it.
  • i've been using linux since the 1.x kernels, and i must say that there is nothing quite like a nicely tuned monolithic kernel.

    aure, modules are slick and cut down the size of the kernel, but i still think it's a good idea to compile all "necessary" stuff into the kernel (like ethernet, mouse) and never have to fuss with it again.

    just my $0.02

  • i had to laugh at the absence of dd, rdev, and tarball kernel source.
  • that's bull. why should difficult and arcane == real?


    i've spent the last week trying to get a stupid ethernet card to work. i've read all of the how-to's, all of the newsgroups, all of everything else i can find. and, i still can't get the friggin thing to work. yes, the card is supported. i know there is some little bit of script out there somewhere that will make it all fall into place. but, damned if i can find it..

    and here's the kicker. i put an identical card in my NT box and it took one, two, three, four mouse clicks and five seconds of floppy drive time to install to the point where i knew the card and OS were alive and well and happy with each other.

    a real OS should not have any excruciatingly difficult setup procedures. instead, it should allow them to get onto actual productive use.

    or, is a "real" OS only for people who just want to configure stuff?
  • As a begginer linux user (I've installed FreeBSD on a 486 dx2 with 4mb of ram, just to try it, then a Debian on the same machine (this time with 8mb) to use masquerade, and I admin a couple of Cobalt [cobaltnet.com] RaQ2s. I recompiled a kernel once, but it didn't work, because I didn't check to option to make it for a 486. I like linux, I've never used X (I use DOS windows all the time on my windows98 machine)) I have to say:

    Linux documentation is _very_ confusing. I'm not a 'normal' win. user, I used to write programs with turbo pascal 6 for DOS, and now I write a lot of CGI stuff, and some C++; maybe the reason I'm not using linux is because here (Buenos Aires) we didn't have good internet until 2 years ago, so I got used to windows. But I _can't_ read those "man pages". They are very confusing, log, with no examples. HOWTOs are fine, but if I want to do something different, I don't know where to consult.

    When I was learning Perl, a friend of mine gave me one of those O'Relly (or something) books, and I was like the logenst book I've ever see. I like a good book, but I don't want to go through 100000000 pages just to get some data from a <form>, and open a text file.. I culdn't find a decent Perl tutorial on the net, and the perl man page is _very_ long and confusing, with no examples (I found an HTML formatted perl man page, but it's still no good).

    Maybe I understand man pages now better that 1 year ago (when I installed the first FreeBSD), but it's still not good..

    Imagine a normal Windows user..

  • :) I would have to agree.

    However, I was pretty thankful for modules the other day when I needed to add a weird parameter to my ethernet card driver to get it to work better. I didn't know which one it was, but I knew which one I tried that *didn't* work. ...so I ran 'strings' on the module, looked at the names, and counted up six to the correct option number..... ;)

    Okay, that was just silly, but I was using stock Red Hat stuff, and didn't have the source installed. What can I say, I deserved it....

    But yeah, if you get a good, working monolithic configuration, god don't change it. That's what I had in the early days of Linux 2.0 when I was deciding whether to use modules or not. I'm glad I know how to use them now, but it took me a while to get that #@*&in' sound card to agree with me on that point. :)
    ---
    pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
  • > They must perceive some sort of demand among their generic Win32 users for basic Linux installation help. You have me to thank for that. I used to subscribe to PC World. When I cancelled, I used the reply card to say that I was cancelling because they never had any Linux coverage. Now they do. So filling out those reply cards can make a difference.
  • Maybe with the horde of Gnome and KDE converted folks moving into the world of linux this will become less of a ritual of passing.

    However, I have a perfectly well running linux box and I have yet to recompile the kernel. I put the sucker together last week and it rocks. Eventually I will have to recompile the kernel though for APM support. I don't care to. I would rather the damn install have had a laptop choice so I did not have to be bothered with it. I give newbies the simple advice of if it ain't broke don't try and tweak it without reason.

    I will code and I will add things but I do so with a purpose. If you have the time to completely change your system around twice a week then you need to go and find yourself something better to do.
  • It doesn't make sense to tweak your kernel unless your tweaks are going to make a difference. Or, to put it in more nerdly terms, it's pointless to optimize unless you know where your bottlenecks are. At the price of memory these days, it's just dumb to be tossing out a feature that only takes up 3kb of memory.

    At the suggestion of this article, I took a look at my config, and I found that almost everything that's optional was dynamically linked anyway.

    I have a PII processor. Do I want to change my processor type? I don't know. What does it buy me to change from 386 to PPro? Is it worth the trouble? I assume that 99% of people are running the default 386. Might there be some subtle kink in the PPro kernel that isn't as well tested? Hmmm.

    There's all these little features that I can turn off. How much memory am I saving with each one? It would be nice to know. Is it worth it to turn off a dozen features to save 64k on my 64Mb box? Nope. What kind of gains can a typical user expect from a reconfig?

    Last lick. Of course, It's useful to have a kitchen sink kernel so that people can boot it on random hardware, but once you've booted, Linux knows what's there, and writes a /var/log/dmesg file with all that useful and mysterious info about your very own system. How about a prog that takes this custom data and builds a lean Linux kernel config from it?

  • So don't recompile and live with what you've got -- I'm sure there are still boxes running 1.2.13 and earlier, and they're still going.

    You don't *have* to touch a compiler, in the same way that you shouldn't have to mangle the Win9X registries just to get anything done. You might have to in the latter case, but...
  • I heard somewhere that unless the performance is over 50%, you won't notice it. Also note that Linux is only the kernal. Unless you are using a server for many machines, I don't think the performance boost will be apparent at all in the application, X Windows system, or desktop enviroment.

    All in all, there is little incentive to compile your kernal other than to be one of the elite.

    ***Beginning*of*Signiture***
    Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!
  • This sounds like a good idea.
    Check out www.experts-exchange.com for some ideas. Look at the concept, not the interface (I think its lousy >> No clear site map).
  • Um. Great idea. Do it.
    (actually, I think that a running "help" converstation on slashdot would be better, since a lot of knowlegable people are already hanging out on slashdot, plus, good answers=good moderation = more karma.)

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • 9 times out of 10, mangling the Win9X registry means, reinstall the whole fscking OS. We call it "registry bit-rot", the net effect is, when you first install a system, it runs great, but after a few months, it bogs down for no apparent reason. Look through your registry for all the garbage that was put in there whenever you installed or uninstalled that seemingly innocuous web browser plugin.

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • Just go to Slackware.com's forum [slackware.com]. It's fun to hang around, help people, learn things, and even ask your own questions :-)
    ---
  • He didn't say "difficult => real"; he said "!difficult => !real", which implies "real => difficult" but not the other way around.

    The reason is that you absolutely need a way to both get more details and change them. Why?

    I've seen a freshly unpacked PC with remarkably vanilla hardware die during a similarly vanilla NT4 install, deterministically, before any user decisions, while a machine with an almost identical configuration (perhaps a different IDE drive and keyboard) sailed through.

    Hitting random keys during a check for a non-existent SCSI card let it survive -- but there was no way of determining what *actually* was going on, nor no meaningful, reasonable solution. That's illogical.

    I've also seen point-and-click systems decide, repeatedly on boot, that it knows what network card you have instead of the actual one, undoing the user's (correct) settings, and switching drivers followed by requiring a reboot. The interface *really* needed a way to bypass it. On a Linux box, OTOH, if your driver is, say, detecting the wrong card, you can simply force the choice...

    Computers are inherently complicated -- especially when hardware comes from a variety of vendors. Ergo, either the interface allows complexity, or you lose necessary flexibility.

  • Thinking back on it, I was once a Linux newbie. But I had a 486 to fool around with. So guess how long it took to recompile that beast. And configuration was a mess! I blew it away, so does anyone know if they had menuconfig back in the 1.x kernels? That really would have helped me a lot if I had known.

    Enough reflections. My two computers that run Linux run 2.2.12 and 2.2.13. I use menuconfig. I compile my kernel in 5 minutes. I have fun.

    I was a bit distressed to see that the article left out modules. When I got RH6, I eventually got over my party over how great it was in comparison to a 3-4 year-old Slackware distro and got to recompiling my kernel. If they even had modules back in 1.x, I had never needed them because I had so little hardware. But now I have an ethernet card that likes to know its hardware address, a ppa Zip drive that I use so infrequently that it shouldn't remain in my kernel, and a few other things, so I started to think about how I could reduce my kernel size a bit. I saw these things called modules. Okay, got it, something that plugs into something else. Well huh. Why do I care, I asked myself. After parsing the kernel docs about modules a couple of times and then recompiling about ten times, not to mention crashing my poor computer to the point where the three-finger kick (that fourtunately tells init to bring the system down nicely) to fix it up. I finally figured modprobe out, and kerneld/kmod, and conf.modules, and /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ and depmod and all that stuff, but not without a lot of headaches. If this had not been during my summer break I would have forgot about the whole thing. In short, I could have used an introduction to modules like the article introduces kernel compiling.

    Kernel compilation is one of the things that, at least for me, really separates Linux from Windows. In Windows, you get a kernel and a whole bunch of drivers that sort of plug into it but generally stay in their own everything-space and have more often than not been one factor causing it to crash. In Linux, I get complete control over exactly what goes into the most fundamental part of my computer, and I know what gets "plugged in", why, and where the stuff goes. I can put stuff in, take it out, tweak parameters with it without a restart, and, as usual, have fun. Linux gives me just the right mix of power to make it do whatever I want, to the point of changing how the core of my OS works, but at the same time the power to forget about it if I'm not in the mood. Most other stuff with Linux is like that. If you want to mess with it, you can, and you can do most anything you want with it, but if you don't want to mess with it, and you have a relatively normal configuration, you can just forget about it and get to work. Speaking of work, when are they going to have a Microsoft Word for Linux? StarOffice just isn't cutting it for me, although after working with emacs for a while, I appreciate its advanced features. Never mind; I see an ad for Applixware up at the top of my Netscape window. That's another thing that newbies could use: a good office suite bundled with the distribution. "They" should "standardize" the office suites for Linux and get one good, familiar, and cool office suite that is integrated as well as MS Office, retain full file-format compatibility with MS Office applications, and bundle it with every distribution pre-"installed". (I was puzzled to see that StarOffice actaully had an installer--RPMs work just fine for me. I know, not everybody has rpm.) You don't want to hear me talk about what else in Linux should be standardized. Believe me.

    This is getting long, and people don't like long posts very much. Replace this sentence with a closing remark.

    Kenneth Arnold

    PS - I have homework to do. Don't make me feel like taking time away from it to write this was a waste of time.

    PPS - Don't yell at me, but I'm getting really annoyed at Netscape and Slashdot. Netscape keeps crashing (twice today), and Slashdot has these huge tables that load up even if I don't want to see them. But I've found that the reduced mode reduces it too much for my tastes. Could we strike a balance?

  • I like a monlithic kernel for the most part. I do compile my sound card drivers am modules but that is mostly because I am lazy and like red hat to configure that. I guess if you need alot of things enabled then modules would be realy uesful such as filesystems that you do not ues that ofen. I have never had that size problem then agen I do not have that many things enabled. Any way what I had intended to saw is I lernd to compile a kernel in the first week or so of uesing Linux and I did not find it that hard.
  • You do have a great idea.

    Do inform me if the idea takes shape.

    But why should the site be restricted only to novice users? Even experianced users, novice developers ( thats me, for sure :-) ) have great many things to ask and no where to go.

    If they are also catered to, the site will really get busy. Delve on it

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