[NTLUG:Discuss] suse kernel recompile

[Chris Cox]

Dennis Daupert wrote:
...
> 
> I'd like to use the previous suse .config, but apparently when suse does
> its installation it wipes the .config -- it's not in there.

If you can boot the old kernel, the kernel config is stored
as part of the kernel and can be extracted from /proc/config.gz

For SuSE you always start with (slight mods required for
menuconfig... SuSE doesn't necessarily install everything
to run menuconfig in 8.x releases... sigh):

make xconfig
...then just quit out of it (this kick starts some stuff)....
zcat /proc/config.gz >.config
make xconfig
...tweak the parameters you want to change...
make deps
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/<whatever>
...change lilo or menu.list (if using grub)...

There are a few instances where SuSE doesn't do things quite right
with regards to changing the kernel in an SMP configuration.
For example moving from the default SMP kernel to the old
Pentium SMP kernel (for the sake of running VMWare).  In that
case update the kernel from the dist CDs, blow away (rpm -e) the kernel
sources and reinstall the kernel sources again (using yast).

ADVANCED (most won't need this):
Adjust sysconfig/kernel to specify INITRD_MODULES that might
be needed to boot... on pre-8 systems, it's somewhere in the
global rc.config file and run mkinitrd (don't run this
blindly... need to specify parameters for kernel and resulting
initrd to create).