Earlier this week we took a tour of the generic way of building custom Linux kernels. Today we’ll look some nice Debian shortcuts, and Fedora’s unique way of building custom kernels.
The Debian Way of Customizing Kernels
Debian’s kernel source packages are named linux-source-[version]. The current official source package versions are linux-source-2.6.18 (stable), linux-source-2.6.21 (testing and unstable), and linux-source-2.6.22 (unstable and experimental).
Binary Debian kernel packages are named linux-image-[version]. It’s been this way since version 2.6.12, if you’re remembering the olden days of the kernel-source and kernel-image packages. The new naming convention opens the door to using other kernels with Debian, which I don’t know what those would be, but Debian is ready for them.
To get started, install a build environment (see part 1), plus your kernel sources and the fakeroot package:
# aptitude install linux-source-2.6.22 kernel-package fakeroot
This downloads the source tarball into /usr/src/ where we do not want it, so you need to move it to your personal kernel-building directory:
# mv /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.22.tar.bz2 ~/kernel
Change to your personal kernel-building directory and unpack the tarball:
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