Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
Last edited 11/28/2006

Each distribution has some specific tools to build a custom kernel from the sources. This article is about compiling a kernel on Debian Sarge systems. It describes how to build a custom kernel using the latest unmodified kernel sources from www.kernel.org (vanilla kernel) so that you are independent from the kernels supplied by your distribution. It also shows how to patch the kernel sources if you need features that are not in there.

I have tested this on Debian Sarge in VMware Server.

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

The goal of this tutorial is to build a kernel .deb package that can be installed on the system, and that you can share with others and install on other Debian Sarge systems which is a big advantage compared to the "traditional" way where you don't end up with a .deb package.

First we update our package database:

apt-get update

Then we install all needed packages like this:

apt-get install kernel-package libncurses5-dev fakeroot wget bzip2 build-essential udev

Please note that we have just installed udev which replaces the old (deprecated) devfs in new kernels. The default Debian Sarge kernel (2.6.8) still uses devfs which isn't available anymore in new kernels.