Debian problems

[jbstew32]

Well I installed Debian last night. I selected to do the simple install b/c selecting packages sucks. I selected all the development, X, and games catagories, plus a few others. The install only used about 700MB total.

Anyway, I uncompressed the 2.4 kernel source and put my old .config file in there so I could compile my kernel and all. Well no matter what I try to "make", it gives me errors that are not very specific at all. Finally, I just tried to make menuconfig, but it said it couldn't find the ncurses libs. So I typed apt-get install ncurses and it gave me some crap about not being able to find them (the 3 install CD's are the only thing in my sources list right now because I cant get online without the tulip driver from the 2.4 kernel).

So I mounted the Debian CD and went to the base packages and found ncurses-base, and installed it. No luck. I did ldconfig, still no dice.

What's up with this? Why can't I compile the kernel?? If you need me to, i will give the exact error messages... :confused: :confused:

[Whipping Boy]

Please do.

[jbstew32]

well finally i gave up and did make config (actually i used it to make the other files like .hdepend (or something like that) and then i was able to use my .config file to compile the kernel) So now everything is working for the most part. I must say Debian is quite cool. I still like slack better though.

[bdl]

Coming from a mostly Slack background, I had these same probs when I switched to Debian. Whatcha need to do is install the following debs:

libncurses5-dev
bin86
kernel-package
kernel-source-X.Y (optional of course)

linuxbox:~:#apt-get install libncurses5-dev bin86 kernel-package kernel-source-2.2.19

Then you can run the usual 'make menuconfig' utilizing ncurses, and once you get done and save your config, rather than 'make dep' , 'make clean' blah blah blah, just do two simple steps:

linuxbox:/usr/src/linux# make-kpkg

This one completes all those steps in one command, then sticks a freshly compiled kernel into deb package form under /usr/src. You just install the package and check your lilo (or grub, whatever) config and reboot.

linuxbox:/usr/src# dpkg --install kernel-package-name.deb

It helps to have a current source.list, so make sure you check it beforehand, do an 'apt-get update' before installing the packages.

Have Fun!

[ 26 February 2001: Message edited by: bdl ]

[bdg1983]

Yes, this actually illustrates a good general rule: to use programs already compiled with a library like ncurses, you just need to get the library, but if you want to compile a program that uses that library, you'll generally have to install the <library>-dev package.