Kernel 2.6 upgrade

So I decided to take the hit this afternoon and upgrade my laptop to linux 2.6. I'll have to admit I was a little skeptical, but there were plenty of tutorials on the procedure for Redhat 9, I figured the benefits at this point probably far outweigh the drawbacks.

First impressions:

build/make
The new QT based xconfig interface is much improved over the old TCL/Tk based interface. It did take me a little while to get through the list of new stuff, but thankfully I got it all right on the first try. The new make is interesting. It's a little unsettling to not see the entire compile command, but yet a little more user friendly, too. Oh, and no more make clean; make dep; make bzImage--just a simple make bzImage will do.

install/postinstall/prereboot
The actual install was as easy as it ever was. There are a few gotchas with RH (and probably a few others) when upgrading to 2.6. First, any reference to /proc/ksyms needs to be replaced with /proc/kallsyms in scripts, etc. Second, the USB drivers changed names, but I compiled most of that into the kernel. The biggest problem that I had was that modules.conf is no longer used in favor of modprobe.conf. It took me almost an hour to figure out why my changes to modules.conf weren't taking place. This was fixed with running the ever so obscure 'generate-modprobe.conf' script. Perhaps I should read more carefully next time.

reboot/use
The first reboot was almost perfect. A few errors on boot, but other than my mouse and sound not working (due to the modprobe.conf thing), everything worked fine. I don't know if it's my imagination, but so far it seems to be slightly snappier. Perhaps one of these days I will boot back into 2.4, do some quantitative benchmarks and do the same for 2.6. We'll see. So far I have no complaints. Now it's onto XFree86 (and yes, I don't plan on migrating to X11R6).