"Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe" sameerds@it.iitb.ac.in said:
but the contents of "/proc/version" are: Linux version 2.4.7-10 (<some email id>) (gcc version 2.96 20000731)
(Red
Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-98) #<today's date>
You are prolly using the stock Redhat Kernel supplied with the install CD set, that was compiled by a Redhat developer with Redhat specific patches to the original kernel source tree on a particular machine. The email address would be that of the developer who built the kernel from some spec file s/he had made. And the machine name would be the one on which the package was built, using the last stable Redhat release(ie 7.1). AFAIK, there was this nice juicy soudnign Redhat build host called "porky"[porky.redhat.com] where lot of the package builds were done earlier.
Linux version 2.4.20.db08 (root@trantor5) (gcc version 3.3.1 20030626 (Debian prerelease)) #1 Wed Aug 6 20:10:23 IST 2003
The kernel version says its a 2.4.20 kernel, and "db08" is an additional tag that I attached when building it, which means its a deb, created in August using the standard Debian packaging tools.
"root@trantor5" probably tells who built the kernel. But I am damn sure I didn't build it as root, but just as a normal user, so I don't know why it says root!
Maybe you used Debian's kernel-pkg :)Did you use fakeroot or su-ed?
You'll notice that the "Debian prerelease" is actually _inside_ the the parentheses that enclose the gcc version. I am not really sure how to interpret this, but I think it just tells which distribution the compiler is from.
The "#1" probably means that this was the first kernel built from the source tree, or something like that.
The date is not _today's_ date, but the build date.