> I thought that the kernel was independent from the software > running on a particular machine. Considering that the kernel provides access to all of the hardware, this not true. The hardware drivers are a moving target, drivers change, and methods change. For example there is the old method of using mknod for devices, then there was devfs, in the future there will be udev. > I know that a person runs some distribution, then often > downloads later kernel source, recompiles it and everything > is fine. Yep. > I thought I'd start by doing something simpler. I simply tried > to boot Slackware 8 with a speakup-enabled slackware 9 kernel This almost never works. The loadable kernel modules won't match along with other stuff. When the kernel boots it tries to find its needed modules in /lib/modules, and they won't be there. > tried to use a slackware 8 boot disk after I'd installed 9.1 > on my hard disk. In both cases, I couldn't boot. I got a kernel > panic (which speakup read fine.) Why? You should be able to boot a slack9.1 system with a slack8 boot disk, provided you specify something like this at the first prompt mount root=/dev/hda2 ro You need to specify your root partition. I noticed that the command to do this changed in the 9.x series, I think you now need to specify noinitrd or something like that, read the BOOTING.TXT file in slackware, and the boot disk will usually say something like this: you can boot your linux system in a pinch by doing this (follow those instructions). I guess its a chicken and egg scenario since linux isn't loaded yet so no speakup. -- Doug
