Help creating a Linux system

[antipacket]

I have been using Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS distribution) for almost a year now, and I feel I have an intermediate understanding about Linux.

I am sick of distributors modifying everything they incorporate into their distributions, and I have decided I want to use official releases of stuff only, so I am going to now build my own Linux system.

Obviously I am not going to just snap my fingers and become an overnight Linux expert, so for now my goal is to create a Linux system that is booted with GRUB2, and has the GNU-core tools installed. Thats it!


I am in the middle of making my Linux system from a live session of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

What I have done:

Created a file volume using the file system EXT4.

Created the directories:
/boot/
/lost+found/

I have compiled the Linux kernel with the following commands:
make mrproper
make config
make

The Linux README file says to copy the kernel image from (linuxsourcedir)/arch/i386/bzImage to the place where my regular bootable kernel is found. For me, this will be /boot/

The problem is that the bzImage in reference is a symbolic link, so, where can I actually find the actual files? This is where I am getting lost. Where is the vmlinuz file?

Am I doing things correctly so far?

[hazel]

You can always find out where a link goes by using the readlink command. My guess is that your bzImage is actually in arch/x86/boot. But if you just copy the link, that's ok too - it will dereference the link and copy the real file.