I have a need to install debian squeeze (yes, I know, it's old, unsupported etc. My hands are tied (for the moment)).
The system I am installing on has some nice new shiny hardware, the 3.2 kernel from backports seems to support this hardware just fine. But the Debian-Installer is 2.6.32.
If I simply pull stable/installer-amd64/****/linux and initrd.gz and set mirror/udeb/suite=stable then I get an error about libc6-udeb not being found.
<pulling hair out>
Even then I am not entirely sure if the modules are available in the initrd. I am looking for vmxnet3 for some hosts, isci, megaraid_sas, mpt2sas and mtp3sas. To get those into debian installer I have gone the road of extracting them from a regular 2.6.32 kernel deb and putting them in a cpio archive. Then in pxelinux.cfg INITRD initrd.gz,initrd-overlay.gz. Pxelinux simply concatenates the two files in memory and then kernel happily goes about extracting them in to the ramdisk. BUT, megaraid_sas in 2.6.32 doesn't know about my hardware!!!
</pulling hair out>
Is there a way I can _easily_ get a new kernel into debian-installer. Bearing in mind that I normally use on Fedora. So apt-get install debian-installer, make etc, even in a chroot, is tedious.