GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Install Kernel 2.4.19

A new IDE controller (Silicon Image CMD680) was installed delivering disks /dev/hde and /dev/hdg.

At the time of installing the CMD680 IDE controller chip kernel 2.4.19 (which supports this chip, but not kernel 2.4.18) was not available as a Debian package but had just been released. A kernel was compiled from source to get support for this new controller. The default .config (i.e., starting from no .config file) was the starting point. Below is recorded the specific configurations added.

  # cd /usr/src
  # wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.19.tar.gz
  # tar zxvf linux-2.4.19.tar.gz
  # cd linux-2.4.19
  # make menuconfig
    Processor type and features
        Processor family
            CONFIG_MPENTIUM4=y
    Block devices
        RAM disk support
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
        Initial RAM disk (initrd) support
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y
    ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support
        IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD64X=y
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD680=y
    Sound
            CONFIG_SOUND_ICH=y
  # make-kpkg clean
  # make-kpkg --append-to-version -p4 --revision dha01 
              --initrd kernel_image
  # cd .. 
  # wajig install kernel-image-2.4.19-p4_dha01_i386.deb

This works just fine and all standard drivers (CDROM and NFS) were included by default. The resulting kernel is quite a bit smaller that the kernels supporting lots of hardware (700K initrd cf 2.4MB and 56K modules cf 20MB)!