Re: New kernal

[Brian Mays <brian@debian.org>]

marcus hightower <marcus@starnetinc.com> writes:

> Where should I look for a stable kernel? I have to make a new kernel so that
> my Xwindows will work. (My mouse pad on the laptop freezes the keyboard). Is
> there a Debian packaged kernel that will guide me through it or do have
> kernel*.tar.gz from and make it myself? My gcc is working great and I just
> installed the make.deb and I have some documents but they do not talk about
> *.deb files. 

Here is what I do to build a custom kernel.

Get the Linux kernel source from one of the usual locations (e.g.,
ftp.cs.helsinki.fi in /pub/Software/Linux/Kernel/v2.0 or some other
closer location).  Hold on to the source so that when you wish to
upgrade the kernel version, you can download the patches instead of
the entire source again.  For example, I have the linux-2.0.tar.gz
file in /usr/src and all of the patches up to version 2.0.19 in
directory /usr/src/patches.  When I wish to compile the latest version
of the kernel, I rebuild the source with

  $ cd /usr/src
  $ tar xzf linux-2.0.tar.gz
  $ cd linux
  $ zcat ../patches/patch-2.0.[1-9].gz \
	../patches/patck-2.0.[1-9][0-9].gz | patch -p1

I can check to see whether the changes were patched correctly with
"find /usr/src/linux -name '*.rej'".

Next retrieve and install the kernel-package package.  Since I keep
the kernel source in the /usr/src/linux directory, here are the
commands that I would use to build and install a customized kernel for
kernel version 2.0.19:

  $ cd /usr/src/linux
  $ cp /usr/lib/kernel-package/debian/debian.config .config
  $ make config   [ or make xconfig, etc. ]
      [ Answer questions to customize the kernel's configuration ]
  $ make-kpkg kernel_image
  $ dpkg -i ../kernel-image-2.0.19_3.0_i386.deb

That's all.  You can clean up your system by deleting the
kernel-image-2.0.19_3.0_i386.deb file and the kernel source tree, but
you should save the contents of the .config file for the next time that
you recompile the kernel.

If your laptop uses PCMCIA cards and you are not using the default
Debian kernel, you should recompile the PCMCIA kernel modules.
Retrieve and install the pcmcia-source_2.8.22-1_i386.deb package.  The
instructions for recompiling the pcmcia-modules package are in the
/usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs/debian/README file.

-- 
Brian