mkinitrd

In Red Hat kind of Linux this can be used to generate initrd image file to be used at the boot time... I used the following command in Yoper

#mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.9.img 2.6.9


ACPI and Kernel 2.6.9

When Linux Kernel 2.6.9 was released I saw that the ACPI patches I used to apply (ACPI and custom DSDT patch) are already incorporated into the kernel.
There were 2 new MACROs in the [kernel source]/driver/acpi/osl.c
1) ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT
2) ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT_FILE

I made a PKGBUILD file for kernel compilation under Arch linux and compiled the kernel. But while setting the kenel parameters these options were not available. I compiled kernel 3 times with different options but these above mentioned options were not at all available.

I booted in Yoper and read the kernel code, Kconfig files and some scripts to find that these options will only be visible depending on some other options selection or non-selection. The culprit was STANDALONE macro which I had set under general driver options heading.

Afre de-selecting STANDALONE option, I was able to set
ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT=y
ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT_FILE=my-dsdt.hex

good lesson on kernel configuration files. phew!

Arch Linux

Sometime back I was going through www.distrowatch.com and searching internet to see if there is another distro which is as fast as Yoper or even faster than Yoper. As I was looking for some binary package system distro, Gentoo was not on the list.
After some search I found this gem. It is called Arch Linux. It is an i686 optimized distribution and according to Arch's home page
Arch Linux is an i686-optimized Linux distribution targeted at competent Linux users (read: not afraid of the commandline)
I read some reviews and most of them were positive about the performance. Though there were some points to be noted,
1) Arch has its on proprietary binary package format, so installing packages from other distros is not an option.
2) Arch is not meant to be "out of the box" distro unlike Yoper. Arch is what you make it.

But both of these problems are not that big, you see. Arch package repository has lots of packages and if you don't find something there, Arch has a port system similar to FreeBSD ports, therefore you can build your own optimized binary package from the source.
For second point mentioned above, ya, you have to put sometime in making Arch what you want but when you are done, you get a low-fat high-performance Linux distro with FreeBSD simplicity (specially the init scripts setup).

So, for last sometime I am experimenting with Arch, reading documents, wiki and forum. I am enjoying it.

As I am still making Arch what I want it to be, I keep changing it a lot now and then......

Yoper stays as primary desktop.