recipe for kernel build...

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

I have just done my first Debian install, and one of the things I
want to do before I declare it complete is to make sure I can
recreate the kernel from source so that I know I have the source
for what I am running on hand..

I am doing this on a 233MHz 'Mobile Pentium MMX', and so during
the install selected vmlinuz-2.6.8-2-386 (and vmlinuz-2.4.27-2-586tsc)
which seem to work ok, though I am not sure if I made the optimal
choice.

So far I have done:
	apt-get install kernel-tree-2.6.8
	cd /usr/src
	tar jxf kernel-source-2.6.8.tar.bz2

Which I assume has given be a source tree corresponding to my
running 2.6 kernel.

The problem at this point is working out how the current kernel
binary was configured. In my previous Linux distributions (SuSE
and gentoo), I could copy /proc/config.gz which was garanteed
to be the configuration of the running kernel, but my new Debian
system doesn't seem to have that. Is there a different mechanism?

Can I assume that if I don't run menuconfig etc that the default
kernel configuration installed from the source tarfile will be
what was used to produce my running kernel? 

Anything else I should know when building in a Debian system?

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                          digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com