Installing Linux kernel from source

I thought I would try my hand at a little bit of linux kernel programming.

So, I followed the instructions found here: http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelBuild

Everything went pretty smoothly for the install part. git clone and then compile and install. This was all fine.

I then did a reboot and have since then, come across two problems.

1. No ethernet. That is, my eth0 interface would not appear with a `sudo ifconfig -a`.
2. No FUSE (can't mount ntfs file-system)

The fixes are:

No ethernet: for some reason the wrong driver comes installed for me. I have (from lspci):
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 06)

but the 8169 drivers apparently got installed. I thus followed the guide listed at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1634291
Which involved downloading an installing the proper driver from the realtek website.

For problem two, it turns out that the default config for the linux kernel decides that FUSE should not be loaded at boot. To fix this, you simply edit /boot/config-xxxx for your running kernel and add the line
CONFIG_FUSE_FS=y
and that fixes it.

Undoubtedly more to come...