I could have added another couple of yippee yaa yaas to that subject and even that would not have been a full indicator of my joy! I finally got my very own custom kernel (ver 2.6.18-8) up and running, and man, was it taxing! I dashed off a mail from the newly configured and running kernel to my project mate Dayanidhi and noted thus: “Our project is like a Formula 1 Race and we have just got ourselves a promising and fully working car!!!” Paulo Coelho, in his bestselling book ‘The Alchemist’ says that even Fate conspires to help the beginners in a bid to keep them from losing interest, but in my case, Fate must have known that I need not get any incentive to whet my appetite or interest, and so instead conspired against me!!! I encountered problems by the dozens, but the Linux community is a super, super community. The amount of documentation and support is humongous and incredibly detailed. All I needed to do was google the error message that was flashed to me and I would be deluged by hundreds and thousands of articles describing it. It did mean that I had to sift through hundreds of articles to find what I wanted, but having too much information is not as big a problem as not having any! It does get frustrating for a beginner, the need to literally mine through all the data at his disposal, but one begins to like and appreciate the whole concept so much. One need to waste his/her time trying to solve a problem which someone else has encountered and solved. All one needs to do is find that solution. Beginners like me simply don’t have the know-how to figure out the meaning of most of the error messages that pop-up, much less get around to solving them on our own. I love Linux and the Linux community. Three cheers to the Penguin and everyone associated with it!