Two questions about building kernels

["David A. Cobb" <superbiskit@cox.net>]

I'm building 2.6.12 kernels for my own machine.  Two things are rather 
problematical:

The content of .config looks like a Makefile snippet.  If it is one, can 
I add to it the values I want for CC & CFLAGS so they are tied to a 
particular build configuration when I need to re-do it?

and
The "official" kernel images are all built with initrd.  My build 
complains about the size (number of blocks) in the initrd fs.  Where is 
the parameter to create a smaller number of larger "disks" in the initrd fs?

Aw, heck!  I might as well add the third -- Why my non-initrd kernel 
won't boot?
It panics with Cannot open root device on (3,01), please specify a 
correct root.
My lilo.conf indeed says root=/dev/hda1 which is correct.

--
David A. Cobb, Software Engineer, Public Access Advocate
"By God's Grace, I am a Christian man; by my actions a great sinner." -- The Way of a Pilgrim: R.French, Tr.
Free at last!  Free at last!  Using Linux, I'm FREE at last!
Life is too short to tolerate crappy software!