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. So, if you learn to buld kernels Linus' way, you can do it anywhere, on any architecture.
Here's how to build a standard 2.6 kernel:
Download the source. Generate the .config file that you wish. make install && make modules_install (if using grub) update-grub reboot
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.
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.
Just my opinion.
Regards,
-Don
--- 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
-
Don Erickson -
Jack