Installing a vanilla kernel

[Stefano Teso]

Hi all,

I recently had to switch from Debian to Fedora for several hardware-related reasons. The change was beneficial, namely because my new laptop works pretty fine with Fedora 13. However, I am having trouble using a vanilla/git kernel in Fedora, as I am pretty new to rpm/dracut/grubby/whatever.

What I am trying to do -- to get my wifi card working, which requires a kernel > version that is in Fedora 13 -- is to take some new-ish kernel from kernel.org, compile it using some custom .config (to, e.g., disable selinux, that I don't really care about, and other misc stuff).

In Debian it was just a matter of "download; untar; make config; make bzImage modules; make modules_install; cp arch/$FOO/bzImage /boot/$BAR; mkinitramfs; update-grub". In Fedora however I am lost...

Up to compiling and module_installing the thing I can get to. However, it Fedora doesn't seem to ship mkinitramfs, using dracut instead. I am not clear on the usage / constraints / preconditions / differences of dracut wrt mkinitramfs. Same goes for grubby.

I would be very grateful if somebody could tell me just the very few commands to perform the same task I was used to in Debian. I have no special needs, I just want to add a new vanilla kernel + grub entry to my laptop's boot screen :-)

Thanks in advance,

S

[jpollard]

It is the same procedure, but if your system is running F13, copy the .config
file from /boot/config-2.6....(whatever) to get the base configuration.

You can then use make menuconfig/gconfig/... to update any necessary
options for your hardware. The rest of the build should be the same.

The last step would be make install (as root) and it should copy the system
to /boot along with any initramfs required.

I haven't had to do anything else.

[Stefano Teso]

Okay, thank you, I will try with `make install' alone, hopefully grub2 does get updated automagically?

[jpollard]

Originally Posted by Stefano Teso

Okay, thank you, I will try with `make install' alone, hopefully grub2 does get updated automagically?

Hope so, but I'm not sure. My updates were with the traditional Fedora
grub.

[Stefano Teso]

Appareantly the new kernel/initram pair are automatically added to the grub menu by fedora when installing a new kernel from yum, so for now the trick I use is to just reinstall a stock kernel (or one from koji) after adding them to /boot :-)

even though it is just a workaround, it seems to do the job :-)

thanks!

---------- Post added at 10:00 AM GMT ---------- Previous post was at 10:00 AM GMT ----------

Appareantly the new kernel/initram pair are automatically added to the grub menu by fedora when installing a new kernel from yum, so for now the trick I use is to just reinstall a stock kernel (or one from koji) after adding them to /boot :-)

even though it is just a workaround, it seems to do the job :-)

thanks!