Simon Krenger

So one might want to ask why you’d want to sacrifice the fantastic stability and openness of Debian to install a vanilla (= original) kernel (Debian currently has 2.6.32). There are quite a few reasons for doing so. For example, the current kernel (2.6.38) has TRIM support, which is something I am looking for when using SSDs. Also, maybe you want to have a bleeding edge kernel just for the fun of it. So lets get started.

First order of business is to download a few packages, download the latest kernel from kernel.org and then unpack the kernel in /usr/src/:

When I was installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a server, the machine suddenly hung at the following line:

PCI: Probing PCI Hardware (Bus 00)

This is a well-known problem (as a simple search on Google will reveal), so to solve it simply add the following parameter to the kernel boot configuration: