Linux Installation

Get CDROM for Fedora installation. There are four. The website is fedora.redhat.com. On downloads there are both SRPMS and the binaries. Get the FC4-i386-disk1.iso through disk4. ISO is the name of a CDROM format. These files are called ISO images, they are to be verbatim laid onto a bare CD-R or CD-RW.

To do so, I used Disk Utilites on the MAC, opened a new disk image pointing to the ISO files, selecting and command BURN.

Boot, choose custom, minimal. Only the first CD was needed. Remember to give a root password. DHCP is fine. You can also take the default partitions.

Install windows first. Delete all partitions, use FAT, on the first half of disk. Boot Fedora install CD. Install to freespace. Additional partitions show up automaticall for GRUB.

Buidling Kernel

First we need kernel sources. We could go to kernel.org, so they say, or on fedora.redhat, get kernel-2..11-1.1369_FC4.src.rpm. Maybe these are the kernel sources. And we need compilers, and so forth.

After a few ideas, used:

wget http://download.fedora/redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.11-1.1369.src.rpm

Then I thought about reinstall, but that needs 4 cdroms, so I did yum install gcc.i386. There is kernel and kernel-devel packages, but these are i586 or i686 flavors, and I don't know what to make of that. In any case, those aren't sources. Will yum do sources? Will yum take a list of packages? Will someone give me this list?

It's going not. Make (1) oldconfig, dep (not necessary), clean (not necessary), zImage, then make modules.

Date: 9 sept

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.13.tar.gz{bz2}

After minimal install, yum install gcc.i386. and wget the above bz2. Then the kernel build proceedures.

cp . /usr/src
bunzip2 /usr/src/*
make config
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
make install

It appears vi is there after this minimal install and we can begin kernel modification. Look at /usr/src/linux*/Makefile to modify the kernel description. Perhaps only make bzImage and make install is needed. The make modules was rather long and I can't see how it matters. Also, make config probably shouldn't need to be redone.