On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 15:59 -0500, Nick Smith wrote:
cant i just recompile the kernel with reiserfs support? where is the documentation for recompiling the kernel? i can enable it myself, i dont need a special kernel do i? ive never had to have one for any other distro, if i can get the kernel source i should be able to just "make menuconfig" and turn on what i want right? why do i have to go into unsupported territory to get a kernel with the support i need? is this just the RH/CentOS way? sorry for all the stupid questions ive just never used a RH type distro before.
Short version: you can do everything you want to do. But you have to operate in the environment of RH setups and the does bring some differences.
But the real stopper is the difference in underlying philosophy: CentOS is "enterprise oriented". This means it is not designed to make customization of every bell and whistle easy, but is designed to provide maximum stability, reliability, upgradeabiliy and maintainability.
This means that CentOS espouses and supports things oriented to minimizing end-user (admin) induced problems. Upgrades by rpm and yum is one leg of that. Offering a "non-standard" kernel is another leg. You see, if you modify your copy and then another upgrade to kernel comes out, your changes may be happily overwritten.
You can avoid this by doing your upgrades and then never taking an automatic upgrade again (for the kernel only? Or are other things which might depend on some kernel facility also affected?).
It's really easy to do it the CentOS way. The hard part is convincing yourself that it's worth the effort when you can "do what I always did" and not have to learn.
MHO, HTH Bill
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