Since the default kernel that comes with SuSE is loaded with support for pretty much anything and everything, and I don't have anything and everything (indeed, I have very little), I decided to recompile it.

This isn't the first time I've recompiled a kernel—I did it before when I had Fedora Core 1 and I had to put in a (partically binary-only, because the FCC is stupid) wireless driver, then again a few times as I installed Gentoo twice and got rid of it—but I haven't done it often.

So, the first thing I noticed was that make xconfig wasn't working. No problem, I thought to myself, I'll just use make menuconfig instead. That didn't work either. Apparently SuSE didn't install ncurses-devel. So I hunted that down, and menuconfig worked. Then I spent a couple days (in small sessions) going through all the options, many of which were familiar (because of those Gentoo installs I mentioned earlier) but many of which were eerily-similar-yet-different (because for Gentoo I used 2.6.9, but this SuSE came with 2.4.21). And after that, I compiled.

And it didn't work. That was the point at which I actually looked at the version I was compiling and saw that it was from June '03, and went to get a more up-to-date version. So now I'm halfway through make menuconfig for the 2.6.10 kernel (make xconfig still didn't work). Fun.