%general-entities; ]> Due to the experimental nature of the current book, the host must be running at least a 2.6.2 kernel compiled with GCC-3.0 or higher. There are two main reasons for the high requirement. Firstly, we make use of the Native Posix Threading Library (NPTL) whose testsuite will segfault if the host's kernel hasn't been compiled with GCC-3.0 or later. Secondly, the 2.6.2 or later version of the kernel is required for the use of Udev. Udev creates devices dynamically by reading from the sysfs file system. Only very recently has support for this file system been implemented in most of the kernel drivers, however. We must be sure that all the critical system devices get created properly. As for obtaining such a kernel, let's hope you distributor has provided a 2.6 kernel package for you. If so, install it. If not, you'll have to compile it yourself. If you're forced into a situation where you need to compile it yourself, it is highly recommended that you compile your kernel in a monolithic manner, as you probably don't want to go fiddling with your hosts module utilities. Supposing you don't want to listen, open up the module-init-tools tarball and check out the README on how to get module support for 2.6.