Tweaked (a.k.a. fixing RedHat 7)

I just spent the last 4 hours trying to get Red Hat 7 to work the way I want. I installed it yesterday after trying out Linux-Mandrake 7.2 for a couple months. The reason I switched back to Red Hat is for some reason, Mandrake had problems reading my VFAT partition. It could see the contents, but reading and writing was very flaky, with corruption problems. So in order to reliably read and write to that partition, I just had to boot into Windoze. And that's not good. So I switched back to RH7.

After doing that I realized why I tried out Mandrake – under RH7, I would frequently get these drive errors whenever I used the CD-ROM for music or data. After doing some research on Deja.com, I traced it down to a buggy 2.2.16 kernel that's shipped with RH7. So I thought, "Okay, I'll just upgrade to kernel 2.2.17." So I grabbed the tarball, did the config thing, but when I compiled it I got this funky error about bad punctuation in one of the header files. I was like "WTF??"

So I did some more research, and the culprit this time was the C compiler that shipped with RH7 – they're using a compiler that's still in development. (Smart move, Red Hat.) So the quick fix was to edit the Makefile and change a couple lines, so that it will use 'kgcc' instead of 'gcc'. Here's the link for more info. So I think I'm set. Things are stable now.

I also had to do some other tweaks to get USB and the Nvidia video drivers working, but that's pretty straightforward. So that's working, and I can also read my VFAT partition with no problems. What this means is that Windoze is strictly a game platform once again... =)