Is it possible to install a custom kernel without booting to the drive?
 

Is it possible to install a custom kernel without booting to the drive you're installing it to? I've got a 2GB SSD which I'm using for the root partition for fast boots on which I've installed Xubuntu 8.10. I've made a custom kernel but when I tried installing it I found that there wasn't enough free space (there's about 700MB free). Is it possible to install the kernel to it from a Live CD? Is it just a matter of putting files in specific directories and editing config files?

How big is your kernel and how did you try to install it?

I installed it from the deb files. The headers .deb file is 6.4MiB in size, the image 189.3 MiB. It got most of the way through installing the image before it ran out of space.

The short answer is "yes" - grub will accept fully specified path for the kernel (and initrd if required). Lilo might too but I haven't used that in years.
Don't know about a disk based boot referencing a CD for the kernel though ... A bit pointless I would have thought if you are doing all this for "fast boots".

No, I was just wondering if I could drop the files onto the drive using a live CD.

So can I just put the files in /boot and point GRUB's menu.lst at them? Is there a way of extracting the files I need from the deb files or would I need to install the kernel to a larger drive first and then copy them? Thanks for your help syg00.

YesI never like the copying option - something always gets forgotten. Lilo is a particular PITA because you have to also remember to re-run the lilo command.
If you can install to a larger drive, just reference it directly from there. As for extracting from the deb, I don't know - hopefully someone else can answer that.

There's a lot that can be said about all of this,but I don't want to complicate things.Also,you didn't answer my question completely.
Anyway,what I've found is that you can extract files from a .deb package like this;
Then extract the contents of data.tar.gz using tar: