Satish's Blog

i have been learning gui programming with Ruby, .. it is a lot more easier designing GUI's with languages like Ruby or Python , than C . I actually wanted to write a kernel installer , which would work like this , .... nothing related to the kernel is involved in the functioning of the installer , here is how it would go step by step .... : ask for the kernel archive file .(or may be just ask for the patch file and do the rest as same after applying the patch ). process the available config techniques based on the presence of libraries (like make gconfig, make menuconfig , make xconfig, ... etc) ask the user to choose the config technique give the option for the user to load the .config file from the installed kernel and then compile the kernel , the progress being shown in a display window and then complete the installation and ask the user to reboot to use the new kernel i just got this idea, .... does a tool like this already exist, ... or would it be worth it , to develop so...

the latest kernel release is 2.6.25.3 , and i have already compiled it and no problems at all. All i had to do was copy the config file from the 2.6.25 version and compile the new versiion .

well i have compiled the latest kernel (2.6.25) , without any problems on Fedora 8. ... it appears to e a notch faster than the previous stable release, ....... but i have realized one thing, on Fedora, just compiling and installing the kernel image also automatically generates the 'initrd image, . While it does not on other distros, most of which i have used !!!

i had absolutely nor problems with compiling the latest kernel and installing it on my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 . The only cliche was that when i copied the config file from my installed kernel for the compilation , my sound drivers were not enabled by default , so had to check them out manually, then i just used the make-kpkg provided with ubuntu , to make the kernel headers and image debian files , which i installed and then booted. The only thing left to be configure is the WI-FI card, ipw3945 card.

Here is a series of posts on the very basics of how one can configure a kernel and then compile it and install it. If anything appears to be wrong or something more has to be added please feel free to add or comment .... http://220.225.214.101/forum/59

some platform details first : laptop : HP compaq nx 7400 Linux Distro : Ubuntu Gutsy Gibson (7.10) Linux Kernel : 2.6.24 Wifi Card : Intel Pro wireless 3945 card I compiled the kernel and created a kernel debian package using 'make-kpkg' , the list of commands i used are the following : cd [kernel source directory] make gconfig make-kpkg --initrd binary after the execution of the above commands is done , the debian packages for the kernel image, the headers, the documentation and the source are created in the parent directory of the linux kernel source directory . And after that it is simple installation to get the kernel working, ... but when i tried to compile and install the ipw3945 drivers from the source code, i had some really tough time, ...... later found out from a little googling that the wifi drivers to be used with the kernels version >=2.6.22 are the iwl3945 driver packages and not the ipw3945 , ....... th iwl3945 drivers can be configured to be compiled in...

here are a few simple steps for compiling the linux kernel and installing it !! first download the source code of the kernel version you want to install from http://kernel.org and extract the archive into the directory /usr/src/ , now after u have finished this run the following commands : # cd /usr/src/ [kernel source directory] where kernel source directory is the one created on extracting the archive , ... now the next command is # cp /boot/config-$(uname -r) ./config this copies the configuration options for your current kernel to the one you are going to compile and install now , after this to make any further changes to the options execute the following command ,: # make menuconfig note : there are other options that can be used for configuring the kernel such as " make gconfig " which gives a GUI based configuration window, but they require extra library support , for example to use make gconfig u need to have installed the 'gnome software development ' libr...

just finished with installing the kernel 2.6.23 wifi drivers ( ipw3945) , well the actual kernel compilation took me some time , getting my wifi card working took me longer !! . The one reason i very musch wanted to install this kernel was the fact the native kernel provided with CenOS 5.1 does not have NTFS support and i was having a tough time installing the fuse kernel modules on that kernel , so decided to better shift to a kernel with native support , .......... but then after doing that , i had to download the latest source for the ipw3945 driver and install it , now my wireless-tools package was a little old for the driver version , so had to upgrade that too from a Fedora 8 package , ....... now finally everything is going fine , tell u what , even the power manager which gave me a lot of problems in the 2.6.18 kernel is working great now !!!!