Kernel Building and Patching

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

Yesterday I installed Debian on a laptop.  I used the XFS ISO disk from

   http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/

and then dist-upgraded to woody and installed pcmcia card manager pcmcia-cs
by picking "laptop" in tasksel.

I have a SMC 2632W wireless card, but it seems like the drivers installed
are old (the card works but runs very slowly).  From a discussion on
debian-laptop I have orinoco_cs.c 0.09b and need version .11b.

So, it seems I need to build a new pcmcia-cs from sourceforge, and
linux-wlan from their site.  (I tried to just dpkg -i the sid pcmcia-cs
.deb but that failed - insmod ds.o failed, and "no pcmcia driver in
/proc/devices")

I have two questions.  One about what to download and how to apply patches,
and the second how to work with debian's package system.

First, I need to build an XFS kernel.  I'm currently running
2.4.18-bf2.4-xfs.
I've built kernels before, but started with a debian kernel-source before.
What's I'm not clear on is how to build the XFS kernel along with any other
additions/patches that I might have installed now.

Again, my current setup is from http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/

It's been suggested that I use the JP patches at http://infolinux.de/jp/.
I don't really follow their instructions, and maybe that's because the
2.4.19-* patch set has had a version change???  

The instructions at http://infolinux.de/jp/ say

  Download 2.4.18 Linux kernel sources
  Unpack into /usr/src/linux
  Download patch-2.4.19-pre8.gz

But kernel.org has "2.4.19-rc1".  Just substitute 2.4.19-rc1 in the JP
instructions?

I'll use make-kpkg method to build and install the kernel.

My second question is about building the pcmcia-cs system from source.  If
I'm building my own version of this package how do I prevent Apt from
overwriting?  Should I apt-get remove pcmcia-cs first?  Or place the
package on hold?

I find this stuff complicated enough -- and then throw in trying to
understand how it all fits in with debian is yet another worry.

Any other tips welcome.

Thanks,


-- 
Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley@hank.org


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