Upgrading to 2.0

[Rich Braun]

Yesterday, I noticed Linus had posted Linux 2.0.0 to funet.  Having
decided that trying to support the 2-year-old Slackware installation on
wizard.pn.com has become too time-consuming and the system has become too
unreliable, I had already decided to upgrade to a newer version.

I got a running kernel built first try, but when I tried to put in my
home-brew mods, the system wouldn't run.  I only have two mods in the
1.2 kernel, in support of ISP services:

- I have 40 dummy net devices to support running Apache
- I have 48 PPP devices for dialup access

The new way of doing these apparently is loadable modules.  But the PPP
how-to doesn't talk about these; if I try to run the stock pppd from
Slackware 3.0.0 on the new setup, it complains (even though I said yes
to PPP in the config dialog):

  Sorry - PPP is not available on this system

As for running Apache, it appears that the new kernel supports IP aliasing,
but the Slackware 'ifconfig' program doesn't support the alias keyword.  The
kludge I have been using is to build a kernel with lots of dummyXX devices.

The how-to guides regarding modules aren't very helpful, or at least I haven't
been able to figure them out.

It would be nice to run a stock kernel on this system (it happens to support
www.bcs.org as one of the Apache virtual hosts).  Any tips?

-rich