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

[Alex Snow]

Hotplug didnt pickup anything on my system...possibly bc none of it is
pnp.  everything is mainly legacy non-pnp stuff except the lan and video
cards which slackware found with no problem at all.

--
A message from the system administrator: "I've upped my priority, now up yours!"
On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Adam Myrow wrote:

> 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.
>
>
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