I wanted to try Debian Wheezy, cause i love its solidity and as you know some months ago it was officially released as ‘ stable ‘ Needless to say that it’s really stable.
My pc is equipped with an i5 quadcore processor so I ‘ve installed 64 bit version
Having started from a netinstall version, at the end of the fast network installation I had nothing except the beautiful black shell (having unchecked flag “desktop environment” that I would ‘nt have installed gnome); After I’ve decided to install KDE, also for better testing new future kernel, so
apt-get install kde-standard
After i finished installation packages, the system was absolutly perfect
However, by running a “uname-r” current kernel was 3.2 ; ok it works great, but … Why i can not use a kernel not so dated and that supports better devices, (considering also that my pc is a regular Desktop so is not required same stability needs a server.) Then I tried to download, compile and install another kernel and I decide for 3.10.5 version’.
We can start whit this packages: (switching on root or using sudo):
sudo apt-get install kernel-package fakeroot build-essential ncurses-dev
Download new kernel :
wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.10.5.tar.bz2
Extract the archive and cd into it:
tar xvf linux-3.10.5.tar.bz2
cd linux-3.10.5/
At this point we make sure to retrieve some info from the current kernel:
cat /boot/config-`uname -r`>.config
make oldconfig
You will be asked a lot of questions; If in doubt, choose the default answer (press enter), now you can have fun in customization:-)
Next, do:
make-kpkg clean
Compile the kernel (number in bold is related to the number of CPUs, so replace with your CPU number- in my example is 4 cause i’ve 4 CPUs), following command will generate the kernel and the header in .deb format
sudo time fakeroot make-kpkg -j4 –initrd kernel_image kernel_headers
at the end of this process will be two nice .deb files
linux-headers-3.10.5_3.10.5-10.00.Custom_amd64
linux-image-3.10.5_3.10.5-10.00.Custom_amd64
Now we can install the kernel and headers *:
sudo dpkg-i linux-image-3.10.5_3.10.5-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg-i linux-headers-3.10.5_3.10.5-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb
then when it finished, make a reboot ,and new kernel will appear in your grub:-)
* are files that allow you to compile and install external driver to the kernel without having to download the sources of the latter and recompile everything.
