Re: testing's prebuilt kernel packages.
> The only issue here is that the kernel will also need to move up (from 2.2.17
> to at least 2.2.19 and maybe 2.4.9 (I'm assuming from what's in testing's
> packages)). And he claims to have a dual pentium machine. Just plain pentium
> he says (though I was pretty sure you needed at least pentium pro for dual
> processing).
Well, there you'd be wrong. Dual processor Pentium I and <gasp> 486 boxes
do indeed exist. They were somewhat rare, but they were built and sold
to anyone with the money to buy them. I don't know if consumer level
motherboards for even older chips were made. I think most multi-cpu 386
and earlier machines were asymmetric, with additional CPU's sitting on
daughter cards on the ISA bus.
> So question 1 is, the 2.4.9-686-smp package exists and claims ppro, celeron,
> PII, PIII compatibility. Might it be an over-sight that there's no mention
> it'll also supports this aledged dual pentium (if such a thing exists).
> [see bottom for current top part of dmesg]
If it's compiled for 686, it probably won't work well on 586 class systems.
I don't know if it would work or not for certain, but I wouldn't count on
it.
> Question 2 revolves around a custom irq setting for 3c509 card support.
> Currently in /etc/modules.conf he has arguments to the 3c509 card that set a
> non-detected/defaulted irq and base so that it'll work. how do I find out if
> a debian built kernel package supports 3c509 and if its a module or not
> without actually installing the package and then reading through the
> contents... or downloading and extracting the contents somehow. Shouldn't
> there be some info about that somewhere in a header, or on a package
> maintatiner's web-page [which I havn't found, though I looked].
Go to http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages. At the bottom of the page,
there's a file search form. Search for "3c509.o" in the testing (or unstable)
distribution, and you'll get a list of kernel packages that support the
3c509 as a module. I think most of them would.
> Also the answer to this question would be useful in letting me build a similar
> kernel that I know will support 3c509 as a module, and work with his smp
> machine. I'd like to have most of the generic stuff in there too, but I don't
> know what it is right now.
Building a custom kernel is always the first thing I do after installing
Debian. There's a Kernel HOWTO which explains all the details of how to
build and install kernels.
Eric
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