Slackware TTY - that stupid penguin

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Originally Posted by sean

The particular computer in question that started this thread, however, is purely for my hobbyist-kernel-hacking. So it frequently needs a reinstall -

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Not that I do any kernel hacking, but why would this lead to a reinstall? You do know you can use grub to select a kernel at boot time (and so always have access to a working kernel), right?

When I use to do weird things, I just had a set of boot floppies (then later, a boot cd) with a console only repair set-up (vim, mc, rpm, chroot, etc.). If I did something to a system file, I backed it up first. Then if I couldn't boot, it was just a matter of using the rescue CD to mount the filesystem and swap the files back (or whatever). That'd also allow you to resolve any "mystery" there might be about how you wrecked the system -- which if you reinstall, all such evidence is gone.

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Not that I do any kernel hacking, but why would this lead to a reinstall?

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In theory, it shouldn't. But I only recently started doing it, and while I was going through the process of recompiling and running a vanilla kernel from scratch - I frequently did something wrong because I didn't understand it all and accidentally screwed it up. I'd call "make install" not really understanding everything it would do - and it would overwrite my lilo config file and thus - the option to boot into a working kernel. Now that I'm more familiar with the process and Lilo, it almost never happens.

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Originally Posted by sean

I'd call "make install" not really understanding everything it would do -

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Yeah, quite often when I make a kernel I will just use "make bzImage" then copy the kernel image (it's in arch/x86/boot/bzImage) into the boot directory and manually add lines to grub config (grub is much nicer and easier than lilo IMO, but if you are already getting comfortable with lilo the it doesn't make much dif, you can manually edit lilo's config too). So everything remains the way I want. If you also need some modules, you can do the same with them using "make modules" (instead of "make modules-install"). "make install" doesn't have any further significance.

Oh and you have to use mkinitrd if your distro uses an intial ramdisk. But the whole affair doesn't take more than a couple of minutes.

Yeah that's what I started doing. My problem was that every half-decent tutorial did some things slightly differently and didn't explain any of their thinking - so I had to a ton of reading and playing before I got it.

In the olden days I had this same issue with the lilo.conf file and make install. Then, after about the 20th time I screwed myself up (I could still get to it via any boot disk and chroot to the filesystem, then run lilo) I read the manual on lilo.conf and the documentation about make install in the Linux kernel -- WOW, what a difference. You only have to make changes to your lilo.conf file to keep you other stuff protected -- that'd be don't name your kernel images either /boot/vmlinuz or /boot/vmlinuz.old and you never get a problem.

I like /boot/vmlinuz.setup for the initial kernel image (the one that I put out there with the really big initrd.img too so that Justin Case can get back into my computer) and /boot/vmlinuz.orig for a ____WORKING____ kernel.