i downloaded the latest stable release of the linux kernel
2.6.39
and i did the following

ran the command
and there were no errors so far so good

then i ran
in the mix of all the command line and characters one of the lines said
because of this the rest of the installation process is not going well i am unable to install the new linux kernel successfully. the kernel shows up on the grub boot menu but goes into a kernel panic when i try to boot it. how do i compile the new kernel in debian squeeze

Did you install the build-essential package? (I think you did, but just in case) Go back to make xconfig and find out what setting requires the compiler support (hint: it's probably in the error message itself)

build-essential is installed or else the make command wouldn't have worked as for the other part of your suggestion, i have no idea what settings require the compiler support all i saw was that it said the stack protector was enabled. does this mean i have to disable it in the configuration step

Do you have created an initrd for that kernel? This is necessary if you compile a driver that is necessary for the boot process, like the driver for your disk controller or the filesystem you use, as a module instead built-in.

i don't think creating the initrd image for the kernel is possible when i stop at the make step, something needs to be installed or disabled

You said that you could install the new kernel and choose it in grub. How is that possible if the compiling aborts?

Any ways, it would help if you post the error-messages you get, otherwise we can only guess what is going wrong. "is not going well" is not a sufficient error description.

Over the years I found that using the Debianised sources (eg linux-source-2.6.39) and make-kpkg saves me much frustration. Any reason you are not using this approach?

Evo2.

i've never upgraded kernel in debian before but i hear doing it from source makes it more customizable for the user, unless your method saves both time and frustration is it customizable like it would be when you install from source

i unchecked this option in the xconfig menu

same here. And its so good, that i did never check any other method.

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=36525
and here is a short version:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=212790#p212790
You, baronbeefdip, might also want to look into "make localmodconfig" (with the same method, but additionally).
`lspci -k` will tell you the kernel-drivers you actually use (but if you follow the how-tos, and cp the actual config or create it with localmodconfig, it will not be of need. If you run into trouble it might help).

I think you misunderstood evo2. He didn't say to install a deb-package of a kernel (which would be an upgrade), he said to use the debianized sources and compile them. Do "apt-cache search linux-source | less" and you will see. After install it will be at /usr/src. Then follow the how-to.

It is installing from source, except packages are made and certain checks/tasks are performed (eg making sure that your bootloader is configured correctly). Install kernel-package and have a read of /usr/share/doc/kernel-package/README.gz

Evo2.