[Sussex] Installing 2.6 series kernel's

[steve at dobson.org]

Hi John

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 08:25:43PM +0000, john wrote:
> does anyone know where I can find easy/straight forward as to how I would go 
> about installing a 2.6 kernel?

If your system is configured correctly then just doing a
   make install
in the top level build directory should do the trick for you.

> Oh, and while I'm asking, which version should I try?, because I was just 
> looking round kernel.org and it says the latest stable is 2.6.2 yet when I 
> follow the link it tells me that it's a kernel patch i.e. 2.6.2-patch.bz2 (I 
> think?). Or when I looked at the UK mirror, there's just this massive list of 
> stuff, some of which seems to be kernel versions and some seem to be patches?

If you look you will see that that patch files are much, much smaller than
the non patch files.  A patch is just a set of changes that will modifiy files
already download to a newer version.  This is way the patch files are so much
smaller.

The patch file will take you from the previous version of the kernel to the
patch number.  Being much smaller they are much quicker to download (even
with a broadband link it can take minutes).

Here how the system works.

1). At some time you pulled linux-2.6.0.tar.bz2 into directory /usr/src.

2). You then ran the command "tar -xvfj linux-2.6.0.tar.bz2" which will
    give you the directoy "linux-2.6.0" directory will all the source
    for building the Linux 2.6.0 kernel for all platforms.

3). You run the command "mv linux-2.6.0 linux-2.6" as this will be you're
    systems kernel source area for all versions of the 2.6 kernal that
    you build.

4). You make the kernel, install it and all is well with the world :-)
    There are a number of HOWTOs about on building and installing the
    kernel.

4). Later you discover that version 2.6.2 of the code is out so you 
    download patch-2.6.1.bz2 and patch-2.6.2.bz2, again putting them
    into /usr/src

5). You then cd into /usr/src/linux-2.6 and run the command
      ./scripts/patch-kernel . ..
    Which will patch the current build source (given by the first 
    argument ".") with the patchs found (in the directory given as
    the second argument "..").

6). You then do a 
      make oldconfig
    to set any new kernel build options and build and install the kernel
    as you did before.

Hope this is clear.

Steve