HOWTO: Kernel compilation

[luca_linux]

I thought to write this HowTo, since the kernel compile process on Ubuntu is made easier because this distro is debian-based.
First of all, download the kernel package you like from kernel.org or from the Ubuntu repositories.
If you want the official kernel patched by the Ubuntu Team, just type:

sudo apt-get install linux-tree

In this case we'll use the latest stable vanilla kernel version available.
For the compile process you'll need the following packages on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install kernel-package
sudo apt-get install gcc
sudo apt-get install libncurses5
sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
sudo apt-get install libqt3-mt-dev

Now untar the package:

cd /usr/src
sudo tar --bzip2 -xvf linux-2.6.12.tar.bz2

Create the following symlink:

sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.12 /usr/src/linux
cd /usr/src/linux

Now you can start customizing your kernel configuration; there two way, the first one is graphical, the second one pseudo-graphical:

sudo make xconfig

Or:

sudo make menuconfig

Then, after having finished the customization, we have to start the compile process:

sudo make-kpkg clean
sudo make-kpkg --append-to-version=-custom kernel_image modules_image

The revision flag is optional and is just useful to edit the kernel name showed through uname -r. You can write whatever you want instead of "-custom".

There's also another interesting and useful flag, that is --initrd. The vanilla kernel is not enable yet to make use of initrd properly, and in fact there's a patch for this. The Ubuntu official kernel is a vanilla kernel patched with some patches among which there's the one for initrd. So, if you are compiling a vanilla kernel, you should take --initrd out; otherwise, if you are compiling a Ubuntu kernel, you can make use of initrd and you probably would that.

Note that now you'll have a .deb package in /usr/src ready to be installed as any other package through a simple double-click.
Grub will be updated automatically.
So, just type:

sudo dpkg -i kernel-image-2.6.12-custom_10.00.Custom_i386.deb

Enjoy.