Slackware 9.1: Rebuilding the kernel

Slackware, as we’ve said before is not a distribution for the faint-hearted. However, it does force upon on you a special kind of discipline in
investigation, intuition and applied hacking. Unfortunately, we Slackers are also bad at writing down what we’ve done so the next generation have to
sweat their way through the process again. I would have also left things as is but my memory is getting bad so I’m writing things down here. In case I
forget, I can always refer back to these notes.

This covers the type of path you would take to get Slackware 9.1 running and customized for a special kernel build. It gives you an idea of things you
will need to address, but is by no means an authorative tome on tweaking your Slackware installation.

Starting point

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. It has a few quirks in that there is a PCMCIA wireless LAN card, an NVIDIA graphics card, a Fast InfraRed (FIR)
port, a Maestro3 sound system and an inbuilt Ethernet-Modem combination. Slackware 9.1 does an admirable job of getting the system running. There are
a few areas that may need some manual help. I’ll outline these so that it gives an idea of things that might get broken later.
The PCMCIA manager does not work well in detecting allocated resources. The first problem was with booting Slackware 9.1 after completing the
installation from the CD distribution. For the Inspiron 8100, the boot process stalled when checking the PCMCIA resources; the memory to be exact.