Compiling and Installing a 2.4 Kernel on Debian
This is quite like the installation process for the 2.6 kernel. Just unpack the kernel sources to your home directory and cd to the directory and type make mrproper to make sure the source directory is clean. Then type
make menuconfig |
And follow the options to customize your kernel.
Once this is completed, you need to type make dep then make bzImage && make modules to compile the kernel which may take a long time to complete depending on what options you have selected during the configuration phase. After this is complete, type make modules_install then type the arch/i386/boot/bzImage file to /boot and the System.map to the /boot directory. then this command.
mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd-1 /lib/modules/2.4.29 |
Where 2.4.29 is the directory where your kernel modules for your kernel image reside.
The compilation process.
cd linux-2.4.29/ make mrproper make menuconfig make BzImage && make modules make modules_install cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot && cp System.map /boot mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd-1 /lib/modules/2.4.29 |
On my new Debian Sarge system this how it was laid out after installing the modules. Then just edit your /boot/grub/menu/lst file to add the new kernel. When you copy the System.map to the /boot directory, you can name it System.map-1 for example and then type ln -s System.map-1 System.map so that the mkinitrd utility can find it. Then when you install another kernel you can just symlink that new System.map file eg, System.map-2 to System.map
See below for an example.
total 11M drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K 05-03-07 09:16 pm . drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4.0K 05-03-07 08:56 pm .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 05-03-07 06:34 am bzImage -> bzImage-1 -rw-r--r-- 1 goku goku 856K 05-03-07 12:28 am bzImage-1 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 44K 04-03-07 11:38 pm config-2.4.27-2-386 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K 05-03-07 02:28 pm grub -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.9M 05-03-07 03:43 am initrd-1 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.7M 05-03-07 08:57 am initrd.img-2.4.27-2-386 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 05-03-07 06:38 am System.map -> /boot/System.map-1 -rw-r--r-- 1 goku goku 515K 05-03-07 06:38 am System.map-1 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 530K 02-03-07 05:18 am System.map-2.4.27-2-386 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 798K 05-03-07 08:57 am vmlinuz-2.4.27-2-386 |
Compiling and Installing a 2.6+ Kernel on Debian Sarge
To compile a new kernel on Debian 6.0, firstly you need to download a kernel source package from kernel.org. Once you have copied it to your home directory in an appropriate folder, just type tar -jxvf linux-3.0.3.tar.bz2 to unpack it then type cd linux-3.0.3 and type make mrproper to make sure the source tree is clean.
Then type make menuconfig and follow the options to customize your kernel. kernel config. Once this is completed, you can type make bzImage && make modules to compile the kernel which may take a long time to complete depending on what options you have selected during the configuration phase.
Once this is completed you will need to run su -c "make modules_install" and enter the root password to copy the modules to /lib/modules and then type make install to install the vmlinuz kernel image and other files to /boot. After this has been performed, two final tasks remain.
On a modern Debian or Ubuntu system you would type mkinitramfs -o initrd.img-3.0.3 3.0.3 and this would create the initrd file for you, then type sudo update-grub to update the bootloader and add the new kernel to the boot menu.
MKINITRAMFS(8) mkinitramfs manual MKINITRAMFS(8) NAME mkinitramfs - low-level tool for generating an initramfs image SYNOPSIS mkinitramfs [-c compress] [-d confdir] [-k] -o outfile [-r root] [-v] [version] mkinitramfs [--supported-host-version= hversion] mkinitramfs [--supported-target-version= tversion] DESCRIPTION The mkinitramfs script generates an initramfs image. The initramfs is a compressed cpio archive. The archive can be used on a different box of the same arch with the corresponding Linux kernel. mkinitramfs is meant for advanced usage. On your local box update-initramfs calls mkinitramfs with the relevant parameters. update-initramfs keeps sha1sum of generated initramfs. It takes care to generate backups and eventually runs the bootloader. At boot time, the kernel unpacks that archive into RAM disk, mounts and uses it as initial root file system. All finding of the root device happens in this early userspace. |
Then once those steps have been successfully completed, type su -c "update-grub" to update the bootloader. Then the computer can be rebooted and the new kernel can be selected in the boot menu.