First I installed the necessary packages to build the kernel from source with

apt-get install gcc make ncurses-dev

Then I downloaded the source code from the Linux Kernel Archives.

Used Patches

After extracting the compressed tar archive and studying the ThinkWiki a bit, I also applied some patches:

Kernel 2.6.12.x:

• the trackpoint patch
• a patch for the infrared subsystem from http://shamrock.dyndns.org/~ln/linux/, see the Infrared page for details
• Software Suspend 2 (version 2.1.9.5 for kernel 2.6.12) for Suspend-to-Disk
• manually patched the libata driver to get the optical drive to work properly, see the CD-RW/DVD-RW Multi-Burner page for details

Kernel 2.6.14:

• a patch for the infrared subsystem from http://shamrock.dyndns.org/~ln/linux/, see the Infrared page for details

The trackpoint patch has been merged into the official kernel source code, so a patch is no longer needed.

Kernel 2.6.15:

• a patch for the infrared subsystem from http://shamrock.dyndns.org/~ln/linux/, see the Infrared page for details
• a patch necessary for Suspend-to-RAM, see the Harddisk page for details
• to support some nifty features like controlling the battery charging I use the new and absolutely great tp_smapi kernel module, see http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/SMAPI_support_for_Linux

Configurating, Compiling and Installing the Kernel:

I used the menu configuration of the kernel via

make menuconfig

in the kernel source tree. Important settings to change are:

• in "Processor type and features" select "Pentium M" for the processor familiy to optimize for the Pentium-M
• in "Power management options (ACPI, APM)" enable ACPI (I don't use APM) and Software Suspend 2. Note: to use a newer version of the "IBM ThinkPad Laptop Extras" you have to compile it as module so it can be easily replaced later on.
• enable CPU frequency scaling, select scaling governors ("ondemand" and "conservative" are the ones I use, but be sure to also select "userspace" if you want some external program like cpufreqd to do the frequency scaling) and enabe the processor driver for Centrino ("Intel Enhanced SpeedStep")
• for the harddisk SCSI has to be enabled and in the low-level SCSI drivers section Serial ATA and "Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support" need to be selected
• to get the kernel to recognize the CD-RW/DVD-RW I also needed to enable ACPI Plug'n'Play support (and of course the ATAPI/IDE CD-ROM driver)

My currently used kernel configuration (for each version of the kernel) is attached at the bottom of this page.

Afterwards I compilied the kernel by issuing

make

and after switching to the root account I installed the kernel modules, the System.map file and the kernel image with

make modules_install
cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.6.12.3
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12.3

Then I added a new entry in the GRUB menu file in /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.12.3
root            (hd0,5)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12.3 root=/dev/sda6 ro video=vesafb,nomtrr,ywrap vga=836 acpi_sleep=s3_bios resume2=swap:/dev/sda5 processor.max_cstate=2 elevator=cfq

Note: not all of the kernel parameters are necessary, video and vga give a higher resolution in the text consoles (if the vesa framebuffer driver is compiled into the kernel), resume2 is for Software Resume 2, elevator=cfq selects a different scheduling mechanism more suitable for desktop use, acpi_sleep is needed to circumvent a problem with suspend-to-ram.

Since switching to SCSI-SATA also meant that the harddisk would be called /dev/sda after the reboot, I also changed all occurences of "/dev/hda" to "/dev/sda" in /etc/fstab.

One

init 6

later and I was running the shiny new kernel.