210

Basic System Administration

nel source reside in a particular location in the file system. Every time you

installed a new kernel source it was necessary to remove and rebuild several

links that pointed gcc and others to the proper header files and assembly rou 

tines needed to compile other programs as well as the kernel. At about the

time that this practice ended, Debian began to distribute Kernel Headers

that were stable and always found at these  predefined  locations. Thus sat 

isfying the general need to compile programs with kernel header information.

Since the new kernel Make files are now aware of the location of the kernel

source tree (by doing a pwd early in the make process) that tree can be located

anywhere.

Debian follows the standard on file system layout very closely, so you can be

assured that anything that you install in /usr/local will remain undamaged by

any actions of the Debian Package System. The following procedure will allow

the installation of kernel source; the compilation of that kernel source into an

image and modules; and the installation of that image and those modules

in the current system. Because the very few packages that depend on a par 

ticular kernel must interrogate the system to determine the running kernel,

the registration with the packaging system of any given kernel is completely

unnecessary.

  Create the directory /usr/local/source if not present.

  Create the directory /usr/local/source/kernel 

  Change directory to /usr/local/source

  Make a link between linux and kernel .

  ln  s /usr/local/source/kernel linux

  Copy the linux .tar.gz file into /usr/local/source.

  Untar the linux .tar.gz file