Building the kernel

[buntubill]

Not exactly a newbie question, but in fact, I am a relative newbie at Linux. Anyway, I'm reading the OReilly Linux Device Driver book to learn how to write a device driver and the book suggests that I download the kernal source and build it. This is needed to develop device driver code even if that built kernel isn't actually installed on your system (although it needs to be very close). Anyway, I'm trying to configure the kernel and I went looking in the Kubuntu src directory for the config file used to build the actual kernel that I'm using and the directory is empty.

Can anyone tell me how I might set up the many kernel config options properly. I would be nice to know how Kubuntu set its config when I installed it on my system.

I hope my question makes sense as I said, I'm a newbie.

Thanks for any help,
Bill

[askrieger]

Re: Building the kernel

Welcome to Linux!

The first thing to do is to download the package build-essentials because you can't compile anything without it. Next, find out which kernel you're using with the Konsole command "uname -a". Then update to the latest kernel for your processor architecture. Probably a version of linux-2.12.16

Then look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelHowto or just go to the front page of the wiki and search on kernel.

Have fun!