--- Don Erickson wrote:
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Justin Dugger wrote:
Certainly, there's good reasons to build your own kernel and appreciate
the complexity that
you can build yourself into, but we all love
scripts to automate the
repetitive and boring parts =)
Right, but there are already scripts to automate building the kernel in the standard kernel sources, and those work on anybody's machine. ...
It's not that tough. I frankly have never seen how the debian kernel build process was any improvement over this, and from the stories I have seen recently, I am even more solidly convinced that it's not really "easier", especially if you have to jump through the hoops that "Jack" has described just to build a stupid hardware module. That should be a trivial task, and the frustration he has endured should be a solid argument for enduring the learning curve to do it the "real" way in the first place.
Right, I thought it was just a matter of apt-getting the kernel sources and doing the normal kernel building process. I don't know why debian is so clueless on this point. I did manage to build a somewhat functional kernel the debian way, but there are some broken things in it. I did that just to see if it could be done. Time to figure out and "successfully" build a debian kernel approx. 3 hours. Time to download sources from kernel.org and compile a fully functional kernel trimmed to my specific hardware: less than 30 minutes. Now if I could only figure out how to make scanimage detect my scanner in debian. Which, I had no problem with in Mandrake under a 2.4 kernel.
BTW. Jack really is my middle name, so we can use it without putting quotes around it. ;')
If you're running a kernel that you built in the above described manner, you can build any "non-standard" modules and load them without rebooting, loading any additional packages, or trying to untangle the debian (or anybody else's) kernel source package maze.
There are lots of things I like about debian, but there are a few that I don't.
Brian JD