Most people ask the reason of upgrading kernel and how to do it. The operating system’s kernel is the basic element of your operating system and is responsible for managing various tasks, like memory management, pagination and many many more. As you can understand, the kernel includes some modules that are essential for the identification of your hardware, such as your network card and more.
The disadvantage is that the default installation of the kernel includes many more elements that what you really need. For instance, if your computer has an AMD processor, you really have no apparent reason to use the modules that the kernel includes for Intel processors.
So, there comes up a need to create your own configuration for your kernel. One more reason to do that is that you may need to have the latest kernel version on your pc, specially important if some hardware does not work with your current kernel (like in Debian).
The process to upgrade your kernel is very simple. For starters head to kernel.org and download the latest stable kernel(click on F). The time that this tutorial was written, the latest one was linux-2.6.31.2.tar.bz2. From this point on, be a superuser(root) at your terminal.
After you download the kernel, extract it at /usr/src. Become a root with “su -” (or sudo -s and such) and extract using:
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tar xfvj linux-2.6.xx.tar.bz2
tar xfvz linux-2.6.xx.tar.gz (if it's gzipped)
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ln -s linux-2.6.xx/ linux
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cd /usr/src/linux
make mrproper
make clean
make menuconfig
- make mrproper erases whatever config file was existant (if there is a .config file it gets deleted).
- make clean is not essential at that point, but if you have made any previous compilations, it erases whatever changes have been made since the previous make.
- make menuconfig appears a configuration menu at the shell and from here you can add and remove any modules or built in features you need.
While inside /usr/src/linux type:
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make
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make modules_install
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cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.xx/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.xx
cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.xx/System.map /boot/System.map-2.6.xx
For instance in grub:
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vim /etc/grub.conf
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title Linux (2.6.24)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24 ro root=/dev/hda2 hdd=ide-scsi
You can now reboot to your newly upgraded kernel