toward the end of a class on friday, just for fun, i showed the students how to install git, clone the latest kernel source, and build and install a new kernel. since it was getting close to end of day, i wanted to keep it simple and directed them to just "make defconfig" to see what would happen. the configuration and build of the kernel and modules worked fine, they installed the kernel and modules, then rebooted but the new kernel panicked almost immediately, apparently whining that it couldn't mount the root filesystem. since they were all running LVM-based systems, i assumed that perhaps we needed to explicitly add LVM support during the config step. i'd still like to be able to build and boot a new kernel on an updated centos box so, later today, i'm going to reinstall 5.5 on a system without LVM (just define some fixed filesystems) to see if that makes a difference. has anyone done this? should i be able to? to recap, all i want to do on a fully-updated centos 5.5 box is * install the development tools * install git * clone the latest kernel repo * make defconfig * make * install new kernel and modules * reboot to new kernel i'm willing to accept that it won't be a perfect kernel and perhaps some drivers will be missing, but at the very least, it should boot without panicking. again, anyone else done this? should it work? i'll try this later today as soon as i have access to my test system again. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================