[Haifux] No! No! Don't compile your kernel!

[Oron Peled]

On Monday, 24 בJanuary 2011 22:11:49 Eli Billauer wrote:
> ... It was easy enough to do for real. And I had this feeling 
> that the system was meant to be hacked. It belonged to me. And that's 
> fading away, most likely because nobody really seems to care about this. 
> Linux is becoming a piece of opaque spaghetti, but it's OK as long as 
> yum this or apt-get that trades one bug for another. Spaghetti is not 
> free software. Not in any sense.

1. You should not be too worried about "the lost art" of kernel
    compilation from sources.
    Yes, only a tiny  fraction of Linux users today compile their
    kernel (gcc, whatever)., but comparing fractions is a mistake.
    The *number* of people doing these compiles today in comparison
    with, say, 15 years ago is many-fold.
    It's simply that we now have many more people who are *only users*
    and should take their needs in account *as well* -- It doesn't mean
    we have less *developers* or that "very few" can do this the "old way"

2. The system in general *is* more complex today than 15 years ago.
    But attributing this purely to developers "surrendering" fashion is
    ignoring the real changes that affected Linux during this time:
    a lot more architectures, more cpus (numa), dynamic peripherals
    (scsi, usb, hot-plug pci, etc), hot-plugable cpus and ram (balloning)
     virtualization, embedded systems.
     And please note I only mentioned hardware related changes, ignoring
     functional changes (e.g: desktop integration)

So not only you can compile your own stuff today, many of us do this
pretty routinely (you cannot evade it completely in embdeded space yet).
However, if you want to compile key parts of a modern *desktop* you'll
simply have to work harder.

BTW: the apt-get/yum mentioned before in this thread would also help you
         compile on your own because they can both bring you the build
         dependencies (and document them for you) and also contain the
         steps required for the build (which you can compare with your
         manual process if you have problems).

Don't worry ;-)

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then
you and I will still each have one apple.  But if you have an idea and I
have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two
ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw
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