[LBo] Week 32: Compiling the Kernel

[Stefan Waidele jun.]

Hello again everybody,

the Rute-book takes us to the wonderful world of kernel-building :)

http://rute.2038bug.com/node45.html.gz is ist "official" chapter for 
this week. (You might notice that lately, I have grown to have an 
"Einsteinian notion" of the term "week" :)

RUTE explains the difference between the kernel and modules (which, in 
the world of windows, are also called "drivers"). Section 42.9 deals 
with building (=compiling) the kernel. I would recommend to substitute 
this section with the howto found at
http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/Kernel-Build-HOWTO.html
which is more up-to-date and deals with 2.4 kernels as well as with 2.6 
kernels.

Compiling the kernel was quite common in the earlier days of Linux, but 
today, it is not needed so often anymore. I don't remember when I last 
ran on a "homemade" kernel.

Some modules (drivers) require to have the kernel-source, so they can be 
compiled to suit the running kernel.

With this chapter, we now have covered one of the big mysteries in 
Linux, and one topic that was (or is it still) being looked at with 
(unneccessary) awe and fear.

We are almost done with the book,

Stefan