GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installing GNU/Linux Basic Survival Wajig Applications AI, Machine Learning, Data Science Android - GNU/Linux Devices Audio Backup Booting CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Command Line Databases DIA Directories Disks EcoSysL Emacs Email Evolution Files File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks FreedomBox Glade GNOME Graphics, Images, Photos Hardware Initialisations on Booting Installation Examples Internet IOT Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LATEX Log System Login Magellan MATE Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks Nextcloud Network File System NFS NT File System Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Power Management PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Screens Security Spreadsheet SSH Swap Teradata Data Warehouse Themes TV Unity USB Version Control Video Virtualization Voice over IP WebCam WordPress Web Sites Word Processing and Printing X XML Troubleshooting Index

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE UPDATED SURVIVAL GUIDE

Getting Started

The first step is to install the appropriate packages:

  bin86
  kernel-package
  kernel-source-2.4.16
  debconf-utils
  alsa-source-0.5       (if you need ALSA's extra sound support)
  pcmcia-source

For the particular release of Debian being used the version numbers will be different. The kernel-package provides tools to generate, from the compiled kernel image, a genuine Debian package that you simply install as a standard type package. The resulting package can be installed (and uninstalled) cleanly and correctly with dpkg and wajig.

Note that you do not need the kernel-headers package as all the headers required are in the kernel-source package. The headers were split out for other reasons (compiling other packages without installing all of the kernel sources).

Installing the kernel-source package simply places the archived kernel source file (kernel-source-2.4.16.tar.bz2) into /usr/src. Similarly for any kernel modules you wish to also install (like alsa). Extract the actual source code into /usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.16:

  # cd /usr/src
  # tar jxvf kernel-source-2.4.16.tar.bz2
  # tar zxvf alsa-driver-0.5.tar.gz 
  # tar zxvf pcmcia-cs.tar.gz

You can also obtain a more recent (or even just any different) version of the kernel from the net yourself and still use the Debian kernel-package utilities.