[wplug] redhat kernel woes

[bgtrio at yahoo.com]

Much frustration trying to build custom kernels for my redhat boxen this 
weekend.

If you are a Redhat user, two things that I found challenging to learn, 
perhaps someone will be spared some frustration by my experience:

1. the config file that comes with the Redhat kernel source package has 
ext3 set as a module. It seems that the kernel won't boot this way if your 
root partition is ext3 - you have to edit the config file to have ext3 set 
to "y" instead of "m".  This was especially frustrating because the config 
files that come with it are supposed to be the ones the stock kernel were 
built with, but I don't see how that could be the case.  

2. when you run make install for the kernel, the root partition will be 
identified in grub.conf as "root=LABEL=/". This won't help you unless you 
know how to change the LABEL appropriately - I don't. I found some 
misleading advice that told me to change this to "root=LABEL=/dev/hda2" 
since my root partition is on /dev/hda2, but that didn't work either. 
Don't believe everything google tells you :) Finally, I tried

"root=/dev/hda2"

and behold, it worked.

I'm still having some trouble getting my modules to work. As yet I have no 
network access with the new kernels - in fact none of my modules seem to 
load at boot time and I'm not sure why. I was told that I have to run make 
modules install before running make install for the kernel itself, which I 
did.

I would love to hear any advice you may have as to how to get my modules 
to load properly.

Finally, a related question- if I wanted to build a vanilla kernel but 
keep the options from my redhat configuration, I fear there may be 
inconsistencies between the configuration files.  Is there an established 
procedure for salvaging as much as one can from an existing config file 
and only asking about options that are not already set?

Bryguy