debian kernels

[Jack]

--- 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