Compiling the Kernel

It is one of the rites of passage. I have no clue why I bothered, but it was something that I wanted to do. Theoretically, having a custom compiled kernel ensures maximal compatibility with the hardware, this step is also necessitated if any new hardware is being used whose drivers are not supported innately by the kernel.
So I downloaded the latest kernel from the kernel.org site. First I ended with a 9 MB bz2 compressed file, and I was taken aback by the size. I was expecting a larger file to be the center of a revolutionary movement. After getting the instruction on compiling the kernel from different sources I got down to doing it.
Before compiling, one needs the tools which are mostly not available in the Live CD distro in most cases. The tools needed are gcc and make. For some reason, probably during my earlier attempt to get the driver for the Realtek Gigabit LAn, I already had the files installed, which was revealed by looking at the application management window.
The first command to put in is make menuconfig. This is supposed to offer the user a list of parameters that can be altered before the compiling can begin. In my case this returned an error that the directions were missing. Further looking around revealed the presence of two types of souce files, the entire source and the patch source. A patch source merely contains the differences between the two kernels and hence is of a smaller size. The actual latest kernel weighed in at over 50 MB.
With the package extracted, on running the make menuconfig command the expected menu popped up. In it there were many options that could be enabled or disabled. Since I was using AMD Athlon and nVidia chipset, I disabled all entries that related to Intel CPUs and other chipset manufacturers. I played around with other options as well - irrelevant stuff like bluetooth and wireless support was also disabled.
The next step involved using the make modules command. And as I feared here I was presented with an error, which I did not bother investigating.