[Lula] Linux Kernel Guru Needed

[Peter Benjamin]

The joys of driver writing.  I've tweaked on for FreeBSD once.
Easily done.  There can be a lot of reading, and if you can not
scan and speed read, mostly source code and hard ware API specs,
then this area may not be for you.  Google is your friend to find
driver tweaks.  

There now are web sites dealing exclusively with writing drivers
for linux.  And of course ORA books on it.  You are looking for
driver books, not kernel books.  Good to know both.  But oddball
hardware is Ubuntu now a days and driver software books.  Google
for the web site.  Yolinux.org might have some, if not, then
it will add them, if you supply a list to them.  YoLinux is run
by a LULA member.

The first thing to do for new hardware is boot the latest
the Ubuntu from CD, and see what drivers it used.  Those
will be the right drivers in 98% of the cases.  And in 5%
they might need code changes to support the oddball aspects,
imho.  That is what I have read over the years.  And my
own experience with Ubuntu, and echoed by others in LULA.

Once you know what drivers Ubuntu selected, then you can add
them to your stripped down version.  Why strip it down?  Just
add another 10 meg of RAM?  Is the app really that IO bound?
Point is, maintaining mods when upgrading the kernel or OS
is a lot of work, that may not have a positive ROI.  Just
because the last programmer did it, hardware is much improved,
and stripping down may no longer be necessary for ROI.
Benchmarking both would be telling.  And do so with each
release, and plot the curves into the future to compare
the cost programmer time (tens of hours for each release)
to ROI.  I'd consider it likely the margin of return has
already past, if running on a dual duo server mobo with
the best FSB speed.

With regards to desktop and GUI... name some names, KDE or Gnome?
Or XWindows or ____?  There are just too many and you need to
post more specifics.