Re: [Sheflug] 2.6 Kernel

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 23:29, Chris J wrote:
> > I think it's the ac3 version that I'm talking about.  Was wondering if
> > anyone was trying it out just now.
> 
> I'm hanging back 'til 2.6.1, 2 or 3 - hopefully there won't be the palava
> like the release of 2.4 [1], but when 2.6.0 goes live it'll suddenly get
> a much larger userbase of testers :)

I think it will always suffer the "2.4 syndrome" to be honest, although
2.4 seemed to be a lot worse than 2.2 (maybe this is just me though). 

I'm currently running 2.6, on all my machines (although, only on my
desktop at work). I'm currently mostly on -test4 I think.

Getting X and sound working was interesting (there is a small doc about
it on my website), but apart from that uneventful. Debian has i386
packages, but I compiled my own to use Mesa/DRI (it relies on 486+
instructions, so a i386 compile won't work - usually I detest compiling
things; it's for freaks and gentoo users ;)

> As it is though, I've heard that SMP performance is /vastly/ improved (which
> is good news for me :)

I've not noticed any difference, although the swapping compared to 2.4
(even current 2.4) seems better. 

> The bit that's different is there is no longer any need to type "make dep".

Just typing 'make' seems to get to business ;) Maybe I'm doing it
wrong... certianly not trusting it to make-kpkg, though, never got on
with it :D

> ALSA's also now the main sound system; I'm using ALSA patched on my 2.4
> system and it's quite nice. I've only scratched the surface though as it's
> infinately more flexible than OSS, and I'm just using it like OSS.

If you changed to alsa already, it's not to bad. Just make sure you
install the oss compat modules ;)

> I've pulled -test5 down to look at, but as I need to update a number of
> tools and libraries, it's not going to go on just yet.

It seems to be fairly stable at the moment. 

> [2] For the GPL purists, there is a GTK config tool, but according to bits
> 	on kerneltrap.org, it's still buggy and not as polished, so may 
> 	produce duff configs.

Qt is just as GPL as GTK... ;)

Besides, I've heard the GTK tool isn't really up to scratch at the
moment. Personally, I used menuconfig - but then, I oldconfig'd the
Debian config and tweaked it. 

Cheers,

Alex.


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