Fedora on a Dell

Fedora Core 2 on a Dell Inspiron 8600

Kernel Summary.

With NVidia a bit slow to release a driver with 4k stacks compatibility I decided to download a stock 2.6.7 kernel and install it. It has 8k stacks as the default. Once I had compiled and installed it I went to nvidia's site to download the driver only to find the new one had been released. Duh! As I had already written up the details I have used it here I case it's useful to someone.

Kernel Installation.

To install a stock kernel in Fedora Core 2 is no problem. Firstly download the new kernel form kernel.org. The bzip versions are somewhat smaller. Move the downloaded bz2 kernel to /usr/src with and unzip the file with the following.

# mv /path/to/file/linux-2.6.7.tar.bz2

# tar -jxvf linux-2.6.7.tar.bz2

Now the source code should be unzipped so change into the newly created directory with

# cd linux-2.6.7

Note

To compile a new kernel is a simple matter. An important step is copying the config file for your existing kernel from /boot. This gives you an existing configuration that can be modified as needed.

Run

# cp /boot/config-2.6.something .

to copy the file in to the new kernel directory. Now we just need to run

# make menuconfig

This gives a simple method to make any changes to the configuration. In my case I changed the processor setting to a Pentium M and just double checked that 4k stacks was turned off. This option can be found under Kernel Hacking. For a similar tutorial with screenshots see the FedoraNews How to.

The final step is to actually compile and install the kernel so run

# make bzImage && make modules modules_install && make install

It takes quite awhile to compile so make a cup of coffee and put your feet up :). Once it's done run

# cat /boot/grub/grub.conf

to double check the installation went well. Reboot into the new kernel and take it for a test run.

Resources: