setting up network and sound

[hjshashank]

i have slackware 10.1 on my p4 system with asrock 845g motherboard, 256 ram,2.8 ghz.. i am currently unable to set up my network on slack and also my sound card...when i go to netconfig, it goes through the process very smoothly and says that the network is set up [ an adsl connection]...but when i type adsl-start, it works for sometime and then it says "timed out" when i say adsl-status, it says "cannot read pppoe pid file /var/run/pppoe.conf-adsl.pid.pppoe"

for setting up sound card, how do i know whether i require ALSA and which driver would work on my 2.6 kernel.....

one more problem that i face is that, i cant go to runlevel 3...the error it gives is"unable to handle kernel paging request" but i can go to runlevel 1 comfortably...

what is the reason for all these problems and can they be solved?

[dre2004]

Its hard to say which kernel will support your hardware as we dont know exactly what it is.

I would recomment using the latest stable kernel (2.6.16.9 atm I think) because it would have the most support for hardware.

Generally what I do when I build a kernel for a new system is I get as much information about my hardware as possible and then when I build the kernel I add only what I need (I only build the modules I need which makes compiling a lot quicker)

so to start off save the output of lspci to a file

lspci > hw.txt

then once you have downloaded and extracted the kernel to /usr/src. As root run

make menuconfig

and go through and select the drivers and options you need. I would recommend building the kernel with /proc/config.gz support that way if you need to upgrade to a newer kernel you will always have your old .config available.