Just spend the past 18 hours building and perfecting my custom kernel build. 2.6.6_Custom.1 is now running on Bell.

It took seven builds, loads of tinkering, and a few google searches, but it works great.

KDE loads a bit slower, but I can feel the box respond faster, load things faster, and have these stupid KDE icons bounce faster when I start a KDE core application.

Some notes.

1. Never build the support for your root filesystem as a module.
2. Never build harddrive support as a module.
3. When upgrading from 2.4.x to 2.6.x, you need new module tools. Otherwise, you’ll end up with three extra tries and a lot of wasted time / anger.
4. OSS > ALSA

And thank god for Linus’ book, without the paragraph on how X got ported to linux I would still be trying to get XFree support into the kernel.