Installing a 'custom' kernel

bLUEbYTE84 · Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 10:46 pm Post subject: Installing a 'custom' kernel

Hi,
The general impression I got from my limited Gentoo experience, is that portage is (and should be, for consistency of the system) the one and only boss

Of course we may compile & install from other downloaded tarballs and such, but this is not a good practice. However, sometimes we may want to install a custom, or patched version of some software. And the custom 'software' that I want to install is a kernel

It is a 2.6.16 kernel with custom patches. Now here is the important part; As I understand, the initial installation of the kernel must not be made from a custom tarball, instead it must be 'emerged', because portage will think that there is no kernel installed, right?

But if I emerge a kernel, then it will not be the one I wanted.
There seems to be a possible way around this:
Do an ordinary emerge vanilla-sources, then delete every file in /usr/src/linux, and then place there the files from the custom tarball, then build it.

Would that work? Would it result in some potential inconsistencies? Do you have a better idea?

Edit: Of course applying the custom patches after the download and unpacking of the kernel is a better idea

But emerge does not give me 2.6.16 vanilla sources, instead it gives the latest 2.6.17. Or maybe I just don't know if/how I can emerge a custom version of an ebuild :oops:

exklusve · Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 10:53 pm Post subject:

You dont need to emerge a kernel to have things work right. I've never emerged a kernel for any Gentoo box that i've built.

download the kernel source in which you want to use (www.kernel.org); extract it in /usr/src/; delete the link /usr/src/linux and make it point to your downloaded, kernel source; patch the source; config and compile your kernel; copy it over, etc etc.

thats all you need to do.

I think when doing an emerge -up world it will download kernel sources, but that wont hurt anything.

good luck
_________________
eXklusve

You do know that no one gives a shit about your system spec's right?

bLUEbYTE84 · Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 10:56 pm Post subject:

exklusve, that is good then, no need to worry.
But I guess the approach I mentioned in the Edit: part is a little better, since it would not result a re-emerging of a kernel source when I do emerge -up world. Am I right? Thanks!

Edit: Of course it would only work with the desired version from emerge

So I'll do it as you said.

sfragis · $ emerge -av =sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-2.6.16.26