Compiling LTSP Kernels - Mini HOWTO

Scott L. Balneaves - sbalneav@legalaid.mb.ca

Monday, June 11, 2001


This Mini HOWTO is intended as a guide for the steps you'll need to take to compile your own kernels for use on LTSP workstations.
 

Why compile your own kernels?


You may need to include support for devices not included in the base distributions of the kernels at the  LTSP site.   You may have some specialty network card in your client machine that you've got a driver for, and need to have included, or you may want to enable floppy support, or ATAPI support for handling remote removable media.  Or, maybe all your LTSP clients are Pentium class machines, and you just want to tweak the kernel for that architecture to gain that little extra bit of speed.  Any way you slice it, you'll need a custom kernel for the job.
 

What skills do I need to do this?


I'm going to assume that you're comfortable with the concept of compiling kernels, and have done so before.  You're simply unsure of what's needed for an LTSP kernel.  If you've never compiled a kernel before, it's not as scary as it sounds.  You can find an excellent Kernel HOWTO  at the  Linux Documentation Project .
 

What other tools/software do I need?


I'm going to assume that:

If you're running a different version of Linux, just make sure you've got a 2.2.x level kernel source tree installed, with all the headers.  You'll also need to have the GCC compiler installed.

You'll also need the mknbi packages available from Ken Yap's  Etherboot site on  Sourceforge .  The version available at the time of this writing is  mknbi 1.2 .
 

Enough idle chit-chat.  How do I do it?

All these actions need to be performed as root.


If everything's gone according to plan, your new kernel should be there, and boot just fine.
 
 
Scott L. Balneaves
Unix Administrator
Legal Aid Manitoba
sbalneav@legalaid.mb.ca