Hi all,

I hope this question has not been asked before.
I have succesfully recompiled a few mdk kernels, but recently (due to 2.6 test versions) have been wondering.

What are the differences between a stock (www.kernel.org) kernel and the mdk supplied kernel ?

Which ones do you prefer ? Why ?

Thanks
Sol2k

As I understand it fairly little difference. The Mandrake kernels are packaged up nicely, and include all the modules/options that are likely to be used on a desktop PC as thats what MDK is aimed at. The stock kernels aren't pre-packaged (in the same way) and come with a hold load of things you'll probably never use (although that goes for Mandrake ones as well).

Mandrake kernels are often patched to add new features that a stock kernel doesn't have. Such as that nice loading graphical loading screen you get. The different mdk kernels, multimedia, enterprise etc have different patches apploed.

On those notes, here are a few more questions:

1. What's the diff between kernel-multimedia and kernel-tmb ? At Thomas' site it is not that clearly stated.

2. So a mdk kernel will come with all the bells and whistles... does that apply to kernel-multimedia ? and kernel-tmb ?

Thanks a lot for the help. I am quite adventurous and try all sorts of things on my Linux box....but latelly I am bit fed up with messing it all up and re-installing everything.

Regards,
Sol2k

kernel-tmb usually includes some experimental patches, usually used if you've got some exotic hardware which isn't detected in the normal mdk kernel - not the same as the multimedia one!!

The basic idea is that the different kernels have different patches to attempt to suit them to specific tasks. The multimedia kernel has the low-latency patch (amongst others), whilst the enterprise kernel is compiled for an i686 with highmem support up to 4GB via a patch.