kinder, gentler kernel configurator?

[miamicanes]

Is there any alternative to the kernel configuration app bundled with the default Gentoo installer? Say, one that does at least as good of a job as Knoppix at sniffing the laptop's hardware and making sensible default choices for the kernel?

I like the general idea behind Gentoo, but I've made enough attempts to compile kernels over the past 8 years or so to know that building a kernel that's actually right is a hell of a lot harder than building one that *mostly* works... especially when you're talking about laptops (when it comes to closed, badly-documented, and proprietary highly-integrated hardware never intended to support anything besides Windows, laptops are the mothership...)

Failing that, is there at least maybe an app you can run after booting into Knoppix (or some other distro that goes an insanely great job of autodetection) that notes the detected hardware and uses that info to generate a config file that can then be loaded into Gentoo's kernel configurator to use as a sane starting point?

[smolloy]

I know that when you download a kernel there are instructions that show how to base a new kernel config off an old one. You tell it the location of the old kernel config file (normally in /boot) and it asks configuration questions based on info that the new kernel needs that the old one didn't. Everything else should be based on the old configuration file.

So you could use the kernel configuration from Ubuntu/SuSE/Knoppix (all amazing at hardware detection) as a base for a new configuration.

[bashcurescancer.com]

Are you using genkernel?