Newbie Kernel compilation question

[FunkSoulBrother]

I'm about to compile a new kernel for my mandrake 10 laptop, but I'm really only changing one or two settings to add a feature or two.

My question is: Since everything pretty much works just fine on this laptop and I dont want to mess it up, is there a command I can run to view my CURRENT kernel config settings, so I can copy them over rather than guessing at the many options in make menuconfig?

Thanks in advance,

FSB

[rbrimhall]

current configs are kept in /boot (in most distros)... you can usually just copy them over to /usr/src/linux-2.X.X/.config and then just add the options you want... this allows you to keep many of the distro's settings (but not any added patches or "enhancements")

[bwkaz]

In addition to the above, if your current distro uses a 2.6 kernel and configured it to support this, you can cp /proc/config /path/to/your/kernel/source/.config before running make oldconfig (or menuconfig, or xconfig, or whatever), to pick up the current kernel's settings.

If /proc/config doesn't exist, but /proc/config.gz does, then your distro configured the kernel to use a gzipped copy instead of the raw one (saves a bit of kernel memory, I think). In that case, you can zcat /proc/config.gz >/path/to/your/kernel/source/.config instead (but do it at the same point -- before you run make *config).

If you don't have either of those files, then check around in /boot (and keep the one that you generate when you reconfigure stuff also, because you'll need it if you want to do this same thing again later).

[valoy]

http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=129532