Reproducing my Etch kernel

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

I am nearly ready to start customizing my 2.6 kernel for my hardware, but
before I do that I would like to confirm my kernel build procedure by
first reproducing what was left by the installer...

I have searched the web and several books, and all of the instructions
say to obtain the kernel with an 'apt-get install kernel-tree', and I
am sure that 2-3 months ago with Sarge I used
	apt-get install kernel-tree-2.6.8
but on Etch this package does not seem to exit. However I did find that
there is a 'linux-tree-2.6.15'.

Is there an up-to-date 'howto' that gives a step by step summary of how
the installed kernel was built from the current Etch repository?

I have managed to build (and am running) a new kernel, but I am sure there
must be a better way than trial and error to work out the procedure.

Here is what I ended up doing:
        apt-get install kernel-package
        apt-get instal linux-tree-2.6.15
        cd ~digbyt/kernel;tar xfj /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2
        cd linux-source-2.6.15; cp /boot/config-2.6.15-1-686 .config
        make-kpkg --rootcmd fakeroot --initrd \
			--append-to-version -drst --revision 1 kernel-image
		dpkg -i ../linux-image-2.6.15-drst_1_i386.deb
which produces:
-rw-r--r-- 1 digbyt digbyt 15818364 2006-04-29 17:56 ../linux-image-2.6.15-drst_1_i386.deb

Does this look reasonable? Why the 'i386' suffix when config was '686'?

Here is the result of my effort in /boot:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   65416 2006-03-06 12:30 config-2.6.15-1-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   65415 2006-04-29 17:05 config-2.6.15-drst
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4684006 2006-04-17 09:00 initrd.img-2.6.15-1-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4699957 2006-04-29 18:02 initrd.img-2.6.15-drst
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  680667 2006-03-06 15:31 System.map-2.6.15-1-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  680667 2006-04-29 17:55 System.map-2.6.15-drst
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1147143 2006-03-06 15:30 vmlinuz-2.6.15-1-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1147157 2006-04-29 17:55 vmlinuz-2.6.15-drst

It looks like a pretty close match, except that my initrd image seems
a little larger than the original.

The newly compiled kernel exhibits one change in behaviour over the
original. My sata CDROM, which I never managed to make work with the
original kernel, is now recognised! 
scsi1 : ata_piix
  Vendor: MATSHITA  Model: DVD-RAM UJ-832S   Rev: 1.01
  Type:   CD-ROM                             ANSI SCSI revision: 05

This was one of the reasons for getting ready to reconfigure the kernel,
but I wasn't expecting a recompile with no changes to do the trick???

Anyway, this means I now nolonger need the Ubuntu partitions..

One thing I am not sure of is how to make sure that I apply the same
set of patches as was done with the original kernel. I have seen mention
of an 'applied_patches' files in the top level directory of the kernel
source tree, but no such file seems to exist.

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