Something I found really wonderful in linux is that you can compile a custom kernel for your machine including just the features that are needed. You might think why anyone would want to compile a custom kernel from source when you get a precompiled binary kernel, right? For one, suppose you have an old PC on which you want to run linux; And you know that you have no need for USB and PCMCIA support because you don't have eaither on your PC. Won't it be really nice to recompile your kernel from source without support for these ? Because then you will be reducing the size of the kernel and optimizing the kernel for better performance.
Ofcourse with the most recent hardware, there is no need for recompiling because the performance gains are not noticeable. But you can get better performance if you run a custom kernel on old hardware with limited amount of memory.
I had earlier writen about the steps needed to compile linux kernel 2.4.x . But the steps needed to compile the latest 2.6.x version kernel is a lot different from 2.4.x versions.I came across an interesting article with details about patching a kernel to compiling both 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels from source. You can read all about it at Digital Hermit.
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