kernel popcorn'in day

Finally something came over me. To break out of day to day stuffs, to do something different, something new, something that's not just treadmill running sort of being on the same spot all the time: much calories are burnt when running on treadmill, but I'm going no where. Thus instaed of usual websurfing, email checking, ..., when I opened up the laptop last night after the dinner, I began hitting "The Linux Kernel Archives" and downloading the latest kernel source, 2.6.11.11 and compile. That's babysteps in kernel developments. First know where and what version of the sources to get, trying to keep up with mailinglist to understand the recent developement trends, and try to compile it myself. I've been trying to read up on the mailinglists, but they do mostly sound greek to me; fascinating! The sources were fetched around 10:00pm last night. Had to unzip w/ 'bzip2' in /usr/src/ then untar the whole directory. inside /usr/src/linux-2.6.11.11, run the series of make (as is explained in Muli Ben-Yehuda's Linux Kernel Compilation : from source to running,

1. make config
   
2. make dep
   
3. make clean
   
4. make mrproper
   
5. make bzImage
   
6. make modules
   
7. make modules_install
   

I think I finally hit the sack around 1:00am while 'make modules' is still running.

I do remember vaguely doing it years ago, but the kernel developers must do these many times in daily basis. Could quietly be fascinating or could be super boring, I thought. In any case, I'm glad I've tried it last night/this morning, and I must train myself to do these more efficiently and to read through & tweak the sources for debugging/hacking.