[gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo failed to start

[Harm Geerts <harmgeerts@home.nl>]

On Saturday 02 September 2006 03:52, Richard Fish wrote:
> On 9/1/06, Stephen Liu <satimis@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I think I have to run another round again wiping out the complete HD.
>
> Yeah, I think so...
>
> > Another thing, what did you mean "...Use whatever name you feel is
> > appropriate for your kernel choice and remember it as you will need it
> > later on when you configure your bootloader. Remember to replace
> > kernel-2.6.17-gentoo-r5 with the name and version of your kernel."
>
> When you compile the kernel, it is going to build a file called
> bzImage, that you have to copy to /boot.  But it is very rare to copy
> it to /boot/bzImage...most linux users will rename the file to
> something else.  Some people (and helper scripts like genkernel)
> prefer to use the full version of the kernel, so if you build a kernel
> from gentoo-sources-2.6.17-r5, you might:
>
> cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/linux-2.6.17-gentoo-r5
> ... or ...
> cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-gentoo-r5
> ... or ...
> cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/mykernel-17r5
>
> It is usually a good idea to keep a backup kernel in /boot that you
> can use in case a kernel upgrade goes wrong.  So I usually keep 2
> kernels, /boot/vmlinuz-2.6 and /boot/vmlinuz-safe.  Once I know that
> vmlinuz-2.6 boots and works reliably, I will copy it to -safe.

This can also be done with installkernel from sys-apps/debianutils

>From it's manpage:
installkernel installs a new kernel image onto the system from the Linux 
source tree. It is called by the Linux kernel makefiles when "make install" 
is invoked there.

The new kernel is installed into {directory}/vmlinuz-{version}, a link is made 
from {directory}/vmlinuz to the new  kernel, and the previously  installed 
kernel is available as {directory}/vmlinuz.old.

> The second part about remembering the name for your boot loader refers
> to your menu.lst/grub.conf entries.  You must specify the actual name
> that you copied your kernel image to, or (as you already saw), you
> will get a "file not found" when you try to boot.
>
> So if you copy bzImage to /boot/vmlinuz-2.6, you must use an entry like:
>
> title Whatever
>     kernel hd(0,0)/vmlinuz-2.6 ...
>
> The title doesn't really matter, but the "kernel" line needs to
> reference your actual kernel file.

For grub.conf you can use the symlinks installkernel creates (vmlinuz and 
vmlinuz.old). Now you'll never have to change your grub config again, just 
make sure /boot is mounted ;)

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