debian kernels

[Don Erickson]

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