Re: Building initrd for install Wheezy on pc without PAE

[Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@wowway.com>]

On Mon, 26 Aug 2013 05:32:36 -0400 (EDT), antispammbox-debian wrote:
> 
> Kernel 486 is very old 1999?,  for my laptop,  :-), I would like to install 
> a kernel 686, as with Squeeze.

Unfortunately, Debian does not offer a 686 non-PAE kernel in wheezy as
a stock kernel image package, as it did for squeeze.  If you want a kernel
which is optimized for your processor you will need to build a custom
kernel.  I just finished doing that yesterday, as a matter of fact, for
my laptop, which has a Pentium M processor.  It does not support PAE.
(I only have 1G of memory installed anyway, so PAE features would not
benefit me.)

   cat /proc/cpuinfo

will tell you all the details about your processor.  If you don't see
"pae" under "flags", then your processor does not support PAE.  Building
a custom kernel is not a trivial process.  But if you want to tackle this
task, I recommend

   http://users.wowway.com/~zlinuxman/Kernel.htm

as your guide.  Select your processor type during "make menuconfig".
Use a -486 kernel config file as your starting point for customization.
Good luck.

-- 
  .''`.     Stephen Powell    
 : :'  :
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