Lately I upgrade to mandrake 10 , with kernel 2.6.3-8mdk, but the sound quality is in telephone quality , so I decide to get the kernel srpm from mandrake, in an attempt to compile the kernel myself and see if there is any difference. After rpm --rebuild , i get a list of files (kernel-source, kernel-*.rpm,kernel-secure) which turns out to be a waste of time (2 days to be exact), because they are just a list of rpms that mandrake compile for specific configuration. At the end I rpm -ivh kernel source, then do make mrprob make menuconfig make bzImage make modules make modules_install config the lilo After reboot to the new kernel image : I get to the point that I can hear the sound in good stero quality, But with the condition that I have to start mplayer to play something then I can play mp3 in xmms I had notice there are some errors during the kernel boot up to , has anyone remember the command for getting the boot up message ?? ... I don't think it's "dmesg" <-- it's the other one ... can't remember the name From the fast scroll during the boot time , I got the chance of remember the 3 fail messages 1. can't umount /intrid <--- isn't that in /boot/intrid ? 2. can't find usb_ubi <--- or something similay to that 3. ALSA is alreadying starting , can' start mixer ??? or something like that <--- the sound problem After boot when I start xmms "first" with out starting and closing mplayer I will get message saying that I should check if any program is using the sound Even though kernel 2.4 is working wonder at the moment but who woun't want to use anything that is uptodate =) anyone know how to fix this ?? greatly appreciated

When you configured the kernel, what sound drivers did you choose? ALSA or OSS? Did you compile the driver as module or in the kernel itself? The "cannot umount initrd" is because you haven't configured the new kernel to use an initrd, which is perfectly okay since you've probably compiled the IDE disk driver in the kernel itself. You can leave this as it is. To view the boot messages you can simply go to /var/log and cat the boot.log file (or something like that). There are 10 kinds of people, those who count in binary and those who don't.