I'm a newbie trying out this Linux thing. I took my old Win98 box and wiped it; I installed Debian woody. I'd like to optimize my kernel for my hardware (AMD K6-2, VIA super 7 chipset, NVIDIA TNT2 video card, don't need serial, parallel or USB port support, etc.), but I'm having trouble acquiring a kernel source to configure and compile. I just can't get them to unzip (using either bunzip for bz2, gunzip for gz, or various tar parameters (-zxvf or -jxvf). This is a box I want to run as a web server eventually, running using PHP and MySQL to serve out pages just to see if I can do it. This means that I want the most secure 2.4 kernel available (I'm not ready to look into 2.6, especially for a relatively low end machine like mine), which at the moment, is 2.4.26.

Specifics: I've tried downloading (I've got ADSL) the kernel from kernel.org or its mirrors using Mozilla's download manager and using wget; I've also tried using apt-get or synaptic to get the debian kernel sources (from testing, naturally, as the stable package list wouldn't include 2.4.26 yet). No matter what method I try, the source never unzips/untars correctly, so I get all kinds of errors when trying to make either a debian package (using the make-dpkg commands) or do the standard kernel compilation (make dep, etc., etc.). For reference, I've got make, gcc, glibc6, and all the other fun development files needed to make the damn thing, but generally, I don't get to get that far, as either the unzipping will fail, or the untarring will fail.

Usual errors I get are:

bzip2: Data integrity error while decompressing
gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--crc error
gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--length error

I know I have plenty of space on my 15 GB drive (3 primary partitions: /boot, /, and /home; 3 logical partitions in an extended partition: /tmp, /usr, /var), although I suspect I may need more RAM (currently I have 128 MB). I do not believe that both Debian and kernel.org are serving bad kernels, so if there is data corruption, it's got to be on my end, but I don't know what I can do to get a clean kernel source on my computer to customize as I see fit. Thanks in advance for any help on this,

Jose

You now should have kernel source extracted in /usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.25
directory.

Thanks for your input; it seems to have downloaded, installed and extracted correctly using the commands you provided. However, after running make xconfig and configuring the kernel to my satisfaction, I run make-kpkg clean and then make-kpkg --revision=686:MyKernel2.4.25 kernel_image to compile the kernel and make a debian package out of it, and gcc throws up an error that makes me believe that the kernel source is getting corrupted somewhere down the line (as I said, I suspect the corruption is on my end, and is possibly RAM related, although I have no basis of fact for this suspicion):

serial.c: In function 'line_info':
serial.c:3258: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault.

and the make process exits without compiling the kernel. The error is not limited to serial.c; I've had it happen with console.c and various other *.c files, as I've tried to work around this by disabling the offending driver (and thus avoiding needing the *.c file) in the kernel configuration to see if I can get a kernel to compile.

As a final comment, apt-get install kernel-source-2.4.25 gets me the source for kernel version 2.4.25; this is the latest version that debian includes in their testing distribution. I'm interested in the latest kernel version, 2.4.26, as it contains fixes for several security vulnerabilities. However, if I can get either 2.4.25 or 2.4.26 to extract and compile properly, I'd be thrilled; right now, I can't seem to do either.

ICE:s are either compiler bugs or hardware problems. If the ICE doesn't happen in the same place (in serial.c:3258 in your case), it indicates to some stability problems with the system (overheating?, overclocking? broken components?)

That's what I was afraid of. The system isn't overclocked, but I'll look into upgrading the RAM and the CPU fan (it's kinda old) to see if that can fix it. If it can't, I'll have to trash that system and see what I can find in terms of a cheap system on which I can host a small web server. Thanks for your help.

Jose