Kernels in Debian

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

I'm sure you got many good responses on this, but this is what I do 
because it's far quicker and easier for me. I run the following commands:

aptitude -q install module-assistant
m-a prepare

Then, cd to the Speakup git pull and the src directory. For me, this is 
usually /usr/local/src/speakup/src or /home/tony/speakup/src. Then run:

make modules_install

The m-a prepare command will download and set up the necessary kernel 
tree structure. This will be a fairly big download, but will include all 
the Debian security patches that you won't necessarily get in the 
vanilla kernel.org source tree. That builds as modules. If you don't 
want modules, see below. After the modules are built, do:

cd /lib/modules/`uname -r`
I think cd extra, but it could be kernel/extra

You'll have a speakup directory and the speakup modules in the current 
dir. Just mv *.ko speakup to fix this:

mv speakup* speakup

This is important! Run this to make sure your system boots with speech:

depmod

As I said, that's if you want modules. If you want it built into your 
kernel, do this:

aptitude -q install kernel-package

You'll also need to install a Debian kernel source package, such as 
linux-source-2.6.26 or similar. Again, m-a prepare from the above 
commands should do this for you.

Change to the kernel source tree, usually /usr/src
tar -jxf *.bz2

Change to the Speakup git pull, such as ~/speakup
Run the patch script, telling it the source is in /usr/src/linux. You'll 
probably need to make a symlink from /usr/src/linux to 
/usr/src/linux-2.6.26. It should patch without errors. If you get 
errors, post a log on this list. After it patches, read the man page and 
help for the "make-kpkg" command. Run make-kpkg with the parameters and 
build options you want, such as if you want a custom version number. It 
should do all the build and compile steps for you, including "make 
config." You probably want to copy /boot/*config* to /usr/src/linux so 
you don't have to answer hundreds of config questions while still 
getting the Debian default options. Eventually, it will ask the Speakup 
questions. I build the dectlk driver into the kernel, the rest as 
modules. After that, come back in a couple hours and you'll have a bunch 
of .deb packages in /usr/src/linux. From there, just do:

dpkg -i /usr/src/linux/*speakup*.deb

or whatever you choose to call your kernel version. You could also just do:

dpkg -i /usr/src/linux/linux-image*deb

Then, run lilo as always and reboot. It will run update-initramfs and 
lilo for you, but I always run lilo again by hand just to make sure it 
works. Speakup should come up talking on the next reboot. If not, go 
back to the old kernel and try again or ssh in and look at dmesg.

Steve Holmes wrote:
> Hey, just curious.  When updating to latest git-pull of speakup, do
> most Deb users go with Debian's kernel source or do they use the
> generic one from ftp.kernel.org?  I'm about to update my copy of
> speakup and even with 2.6.26, the install script in speakup appears to
> need a kernel source tree.  Is my observation correct here?
>