Slackware: kernel confusion

[Doug Sutherland]

Yea, listen to patrick, "unless you have a particular reason" to install
headers then it's better to not do so. The glibc is the crux of all of 
this toolchain, and the same reason why that old viavoice became 
a nightmare to support. The distro folks like patrick play with gcc,
glibc, and binutils combination until they find a stable combination
to build the entire system out of. The kernel headers, as he states 
in his warning, it's dangerous to use headers newer than the glibc
version on your system. You can still build the 2.6.x kernel. There
are some situations where stuff will not build, which is why he has
the headers on the site, but don't change headers as a default 
starting point, only as a last resort. And yes, you don't need the 
modules, in fact you don't need anything from there. Patrick uses
ONLY unmodified kernels anyways, so if you want the latest 
that still works with speakup, grab the last of the 2.21.x from 
kernel.org. Or be like us old folks who prefer the stable 
"trailing edge". I have not found a need for 2.6.x yet, so using
Patrick's similar logic, I will do so when I have a reason to. 
I used to chase the leading edge kernels but found that it was 
generally a waste of time in the large scheme of things.

  -- Doug