Diary Entry For: Saturday the 16th of September 2000

The speed of my Linux system is really beginning to annoy me. Okay, things slowed down when I installed sound drivers prior to the FAT corruption earlier this week but this new kernel is really slow and I hate having to wait while the window manager (Sawmill. I prefer Enlightenment but right now I'll go for a mouse that moves relatively quickly rather than all the cool features of Enlightenment.

I could, of course, recompile the kernel, but so far I've avoided doing that because, to be honest, I'm somewhat of a procrastinator. However, it's now time to bite the bullet and make a new kernel that's configured for my system. Hopefully this will mean an increase in speed as I'll be able to remove all the generic stuff that is no doubt filling up this one (2.2.15-4mdk - Mandrake 7.1's standard kernel). Wish me luck!

I'm on with the configuration of the kernel as I write this, but I had to pause and write a little about the 'Netlink device emulation' option, which is set to 'no' by default. Its help dialogue box says to "choose yes for now" as it will be "removed later". Yet its default is no. Very odd.

Well, I'm now running kernel 2.2.16, instead of the old 2.2.15-4mdk which came with Linux Mandrake 7.1. So far it's faster than the old one, but I won't say I didn't have problems getting it installed. For a start, I compiled the kernel then looked for a directory called /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage, in which I thought would be a nice little vmlinuz file for me to use. But no, I'd misread the text - bzImage is the nice little file I'm looking for. Ah well, soon found it anyway. It installed nicely but now I have no sound support (this was expected - I'll have to download and install the drivers again) and I forgot to type 'make modules', 'cause it's 01:43 and I'm a bit tired. Still, I'll continue and get this thing running properly.

Hmmm... according to make there is "nothing to be done for 'make modules'". Ah well. I'm not going to fret. Everything except sound seems to be working anyway, so I'll run with this kernel for a few days and see if any errors come up.

Now to get those sound files again. Sourceforge, here I come!

Just my luck! I go to the site, download the drivers, type the command to copy them to /usr/local and get asked whether I want to overwrite the copy that's already there. I really should check these things first. Still, my connect time is free so who cares? After all, it took less than a minute to download, 'cause it's so small. Music is back on my system now and it's not cutting out for a few seconds every time I change window focus, so I'm happy.