Configuring and building a kernel

The need to configure the kernel could arise due to many reasons. We may want to resize the kernel to run only the necessary services, or we may have to patch it to support new hardware that was not supported earlier by the kernel. This could be a daunting task for any system administrator, and in this section, we take a look at how we can configure and build the kernel.

Getting ready

It is always recommended that you have ample space for kernels in the boot partition of any system. We can either choose the whole disk install option or set aside a minimum of 3 GB of disk space for the boot partition.

After installing the Linux distribution and configuring development packages on the system, enable the root account as well as sudo for our user account.

Now, before we start with the installation of any packages, run the following command to update the system:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

After this, check whether the build-essential package...