[linux-audio-user] what window manager are you using?

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 15:48, Stephen Hassard wrote:
> Something that helps to is to never remove your known working kernel 
> entry from  your bootloader, and make your new kernel the secondary 
> manually selected kernel on your first boot. This way if your kernel is 
> hosed for some reason, you should always be able to recover your system 
> with minimal pain by rebooting into your default working kernel.
> 
> later,
> Steve
> 
> Andrew Dahlin wrote:
> > honestly, compiling a kernel is trivial once you build one successfully.
> the first time will take a few hours to get it right (tops), but by the time
> you're done, you know exactly what you're doing. i can configure a kernel
> from scratch in about 20 minutes... and i'm not a hacker or anything... i
> just know what i need. i'm not saying everyone should build their own
> kernel, but if you install your distro's sources (with their .config), it's
> fairly risk free. just back up your old kernel. [OT: if you run lilo, don't
> forget to run lilo after copying over the new kernel. TONS of people don't
> realize this their first time]
> > 

99% of the time, if you compile a new kernel and it won't boot, it's
because you forgot to enable some driver that's required to boot your
machine.  So, using the vendor's .config is a pretty good way to ensure
that if your old kernel worked, the new one will.

Actually, now there's an even better way.  I think this feature is only
available on 2.6 kernels.  The .config used to compile the running
kernel is available in /proc/config.gz, so you can do:

  zcat /proc/config.gz > .config

and be pretty much guaranteed to get the exact same working config that
you have running.

Of course it's still a good idea to keep the old kernel accessible.  But
you can reduce your failure rate to almost zero.

Lee