madurax86 said:
ah good to see a slackware user; hehe. XP had that too remember run as for exe's but its only for running progams

...vista eh? patches upon patches better not to talk about it; tho i must say ms doesnt clear up those ...older registry entries in newer versions

i found win 3.1 entries in xp

...same as in the kernel..just gets bigger and bigger..its true that the kernel must grow but man it's growing space not functionality
and just a quick thingy that i found out long ago, windoz doesnt hav tru mutiuser support for that fast user switching thing, it only loads up the RAM. everything runs under winlogon.exe nothing is PAGED, NO IMAGES, NO SWAPPING...n they say they are low in RAM good for someone has 3 GBs of ram
I see your userbar states you as a ubuntu and fedora user, nice to see Linux users around EK
Windows has it's problems, mostly arising due to their development practices, Their first foray into OS market is through DOS (not a product built from scratch by Microsoft) then they used it as a foundation for the Windows series, using the previous OS as a base for the next. They are limited by the capacities of their basic OS whic is DOS, but has improved dramatically over the years. (can you try to compare DOS to vista)
DOS was single user OS, so you have to build multiuser features on later OSes, Windows is not used on a serious multiuser environment just because of it's shortcomings.
I think the old reg entries must be due to DOS age programs like telnet.
I'm critical of Microsoft software but I'll not try to bash them without reason, so you may find that above comments on Windows is too light hearted
Now on to the linux kernel (If the kernel you speak about is it

), Linux is based on UNIX which is truly multiuser unlike DOS(only experience I have with UNIX is trying to ping it through telnet on Windows and trying to do hopeless editing tasks in vi

)
The linux kernel is constantly being developed to suit latest technologies and hardware. That's the reason for the kernel to increase in size. It's not without good reason since people use various hardware configurations, like PATA or SATA, single core or multicore processor, different filesystems and even RAID arrays! All these must be accomodated by the kernel. It increases in size and exponently increase in functionality.
The linux kernel is modular, that is hardware support and functionalites are built on to it as modules, You can add new modules and remove unwanted modules from the kernel. That means you can modify the kernel to remove unwanted features and to add features you need. [rebuilding the kernel] This greatly enchances the performance and decrease the boot time. Also reduce the kernel size.
The size of kernel becomes a major problem only when you create a distro. Let's take Fedora(RedHat), this distro is used in RAID arrays as well as on a normal user's desktop, also it might end up on a busyman's laptop. The Fedora developers don't know where their distro might end up, so they will have to make sure their kernel supports all the above hardware configurations.
Let's take a desktop user, He finds that his fat kernel checks for raid even it's not at all reasonable for a desktop, Let's say he also doesn't have a broadband connection and has no intention of getting one, so he will find Fedora checking for DHCP useless. All the above increases his boot time. He will be better off with a kernel which have raid ethernet etc disabled.
I got a nasty suprise sometimes ago when I installed the linux distro Zenwalk, on my laptop, It's kernel didn't load ACPI! and I had no way of monitoring my fan or battery.
You will find that distros today ship with a very fat kernel or a collection of kernels suited for various environemnts. You can reduce the size of the kernel used, also increase performance and lessen boottime if you rebuild the kernel just to suit your machine.
On Slackware you are encouraged to rebuild the kernel (even you are a newbie to linux

). I had to do just that (first time I did that) to make slackware work with my laptop. I must say that it actually reduced boot time and increased performance, also I have all those cool monitoring tools unique to laptops working perfectly.
If you have tried installing official drivers for a nvidia vga card on linux, you may have some experience with kernel rebuilding.
This post has gone too long

But I'll recommend you try rebuilding the kernel if you have some experience with linux, you will not regret the experience you'll get. Kinda makes you geekish
