WOW!!!! Thanks for the post. Im gonna digest this, do some reading
about the kernel and then post a followup. Thanks again!!

floyd@barrow.com (Floyd L. Davidson) wrote:
> Dave <davido@snet111nospam111.net> wrote:
>
>>> I have the tar and config file already made.
>
>
> Exactly. In fact, if you have a high speed Internet connection
> available, there is no real need to even keep the tar file of your
> kernel sources around either, since you can download a new one any
> time you want. And usually every time you start some new project
> like this there will be a more recent kernel anyway.
>
> And if you have gone to the trouble of learning how to configure and
> compile a new kernel, *do* get the latest release of whichever
> version you are using. You may or may not want to try switching from
> 2.4 to 2.6, though I would highly recommend it, but there is no point
> in recompiling an old release of either 2.4 or 2.6. Get the latest
> one for whatever you use. (That is *not* a generally true condition
> though! It just happens right now that the 2.4 kernel is very
> mature, and the latest release is almost guaranteed to be stable
> enough. With the 2.6 kernel, unlike what happened when 2.2 and 2.4
> came out, it has been basically stable from the start and it's more a
> matter of whether any given release has the features implemented
> that you need. For a laptop, I doubt that anything is missing in the
> latest releases.)
>
> Also, I don't recall that you mentioned which kernel you are using,
> but the 2.6 kernels can be configured to put a config.gz pseudo file
> into /proc. Using that configuration certainly makes it easy to keep
> track of which config file is which!
>
>>> So if I understand you correctly; then I could essentially use
>>> make mrproper and then edit my lilo config file to allow me to
>>> boot into the new image?
>
>
> There is essentially *never* any reason for most people to do a "make
> mrproper". It returns the kernel directory to the condition it was
> in the distribution archive. Unless you are a kernel developer, and
> have made changes to the source code which need to be archived, that
> is a worthless condition.
>
> If you change the kernel configuration and want to recompile, do a
> "make clean", which will delete all of the *.o files and whatever
> else is built using a specific configuration. Then you do something
> like "make bzlilo" or "make bzimage", followed by making and
> installing the modules. (But in regard to your original query, no
> space is likely to be saved in doing this. Virtually all of the files
> deleted are recreated one at a time, and at the end you have exactly
> what you started with.)
>
>>> Im not really trying to get rid of my existing kernel I would
>>> just like to test out my custom kernels with a known good backup.
>>> Actually since i havent added anything to my existing
>>> cofiguration but only removed modules; is there a way to use the
>>> existing modules made during my initial install?
>
>
> Actually, if you didn't change the configuration other than to
> specify that some modules need not be built, you don't have to do
> *anything* with the kernel! Just go to /lib/modules and delete the
> particular modules. They won't be loaded. Or better yet, you can
> leave them there (we aren't talking any really significant amount of
> disk space), and comment out anything in the /etc/rc.d scripts that
> causes them to be loaded.
>
> And yes, as long as you are using the same kernel version the modules
> need not be recompiled unless there has been some update that you
> wish to install.
>
> Most distributions, and Slackware is no exception, come with as many
> modules as possible just so that a user who does not want to _ever_
> compile a kernel can just load a module to get added kernel features.
> That is the whole point of having kernel features in loadable
> modules!
>
> -- FloydL. Davidson <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson> Ukpeagvik
> (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@barrow.com