Linux distros (was Re: RH9 disks on the net.)

[Adam Myrow]

The idea of a utility confuses me.  How does it deal with floppies?  It's
possible that what is actually happening is that it is using automount
which is an optional feature of the kernel and was originally designed for
NFS.  It apparently has been used with CD ROMs as well, but I've never
played with it.

That's funny that you say that the Slackware kernel doesn't have enough.
I find it too bloated still.  It has support for RAID, PCMCIA, and other
things I don't use.  The first thing I do when I get a fresh copy of
Slackware installed is to build a custom kernel.  I like how Slackware
encourages you to do it, where Redhat has a hands-off approach of
automatically loading modules and assuming that you are leaving the kernel
alone and will never compile one yourself.  If you compile the drivers for
your network card straight into the kernel in Redhat, it will get upset.
Even in Slackware, it is possible to load modules for all sorts of
drivers, and I can get a Slackware system working fine without a kernel
build.  However, I noticed that after building a custom kernel, I was able
to shave several seconds off the boot time mainly by eliminating modules
for stuff I don't use.  My approach is to build almost everything into the
kernel, but make modules out of things I will seldom use.  For example,
since I have Roadrunner, I build my network card's drivers in, and I keep
PPP as a module in case I have to revert to dial-up.  I also keep support
for the Minix filesystem and loopfs as modules since I occasionally need
loopfs and run into a Minix disk image here and there.  About the only
other modules are Alsa.  The result is that my kernel is under 1MB and my
system comes up pretty fast even on this ancient computer.  To me, being
able to tweak things to perfection is part of the beauty of Linux.  You
can't simply remove support for hardware you don't have in windows like
that.  BTW, the new hotplug support didn't detect anything on my computer,
but I suspect it may do more on modern computers.  It's probably a good
compromise between the sluggish Kudzu of Redhat and no attempt at all to
find hardware.