[wplug] Adventures in Recompilation I

[Robert Supansic]

I am sorry I have not responded sooner to the help I received relating to the question of 
upgrading a CPU and the need for recompiling the kernel.   Thanks to Nate Sharadin and 
Bruce Lynch for their advice.

The following is feedback.

 I was not sure how long the recompilation would take since I have not recompiled a Unix 
kernel in 15 years.  So, I replaced the new 500 MHz chip with the old 133 MHz chip so that my 
client could have reliable use of the fileserver in the meantime.

SuSE Professional installs the 2.2.16 kernel.  All that I wanted to do was produce a version 
more suitable to the AMD K-6 III 500 MHz chip.

1.	I originally selected SuSE for its documentation.  So I went to the SuSE manual and 
found that  moving to /usr/src/linux and entering "make deps" would start the compilation 
process.  I got a "target not found: deps" message.  I realized that the linux source code and 
recompilation support files had not been installed.  (And apparently is not as part of the 
default for any but the complete and total SuSE installation.)

2.	The mystery was, which package contained the source files?  SuSE provided over 
2,600 packages as part of 7.2 Propfessional.  On my office linux fileserver, I started up YaST, 
which contains, among other things, SuSE's package installer.  Under "Choose/Install 
Packages", I got an error message telling me that the version of rpm installed on my 
computer contained a changed rpm database format.   (Innocent that I am, I had updated 
rpm -- version 3.0.4 to 4.0.3 -- so that I could install a package which required that I upgrade 
rpm before I could install the package.  See?)

3.	A conundrum: how do you install the package installer?  (An aside: some of you 
may be reminded of Russell and Whitehead's discussion of the logical implications of a set 
being a member of itelf in the "Principia".  But I digress.)  I turns out in SuSE, this requires 
"updating your system" which involves rebooting with the SuSE installation CDs.  

4.	Does anybody remember what I was trying to do in the first place?

5.	Rebooting the system and confronted with YaST, I carefully avoided the shoals of 
INSTALLING YOUR SYSTEM and quietly navigated to UPDATE YOUR SYSTEM.  Alas, 
YaST did not find the new version of rpm as a candidate for updating.  It nonetheless was 
kind enough to offer to install a new kernel for me.  But I begged off.

6.	Dead end.  It looked like I could not install any new packages on my fileserver 
without manually reinstalling the old version of rpm.  So I did the smart thing.  I let that 
sleeping dog lie and switched over to my linux desktop machine.  Discretion is often the 
better part of valor.

7.	Invoking YaST on my linux desktop, I went looking for SuSE's linux source code 
package.  Unfortunately, the package installation interface in YaST is little short of bizarre.  I 
still am not sure how I found it, but the package turned out to be "lx_suse" located in a 
"developer's" group of packages.

8.	Free at last!  The files were all there!  Well, no.  Typing "make deps" produced the 
"taget not found message" again.   The SuSE 7.0 manual is decidedly wrong on this point.

9.	Then I noticed a new subdirectory under /usr/src/linux, "Documentation", and then 
under that, "kbuild".   On the wild assumption that "k" might stand for "kernel", I found a file 
"commands.txt" and started reading it.   It told me that the recompiliation starts with "make 
config", not "make deps". 

At this point I was, as you may imagine, exhausted.   Stay tuned for futher developments.  
Don't touch that dial.