Debian is awesome. Really. I love Debian – but sometimes the well-aged kernel is a tad too old for me. Currently it’s about fstrim and as I’m already doing my own Gentoo-Kernel for Debian, I had to do it properly and build an upstream ‘vanilla’ kernel too. What I dislike about my current setup is having to install the deb-files manually.
To put an end to this manual installation I had to do a meta-package – a debian package that is just dependencies. To do so, I used a program called ‘equivs’, which is installed by the following command:
apt install equivs
As the package is there, it’s time to generate the initial config for our package
equivs-control my-kernel-package
This command gives us a template file that’s to be edited to fit our needs. Pay attention to the line saying “Depends:” as that’s where we add our Debian packages. As of writing this, the current config looks like that:
### Commented entries have reasonable defaults. ### Uncomment to edit them. # Source: <source package name; defaults to package name> Section: misc Priority: optional # Homepage: <enter URL here; no default> Standards-Version: 5.9.10 Package: vanilla-kernel Version: 5.9.10 Maintainer: Viktoria Rei Bauer <debian@example.com> # Pre-Depends: <comma-separated list of packages> Depends: linux-image-5.9.10,linux-headers-5.9.10,linux-libc-dev # Recommends: <comma-separated list of packages> # Suggests: <comma-separated list of packages> # Provides: <comma-separated list of packages> # Replaces: <comma-separated list of packages> Architecture: amd64 # Multi-Arch: <one of: foreign|same|allowed> # Copyright: <copyright file; defaults to GPL2> # Changelog: <changelog file; defaults to a generic changelog> # Readme: <README.Debian file; defaults to a generic one> # Extra-Files: <comma-separated list of additional files for the doc directory> # Links: <pair of space-separated paths; First is path symlink points at, second is filename of link> # Files: <pair of space-separated paths; First is file to include, second is destination> # <more pairs, if there's more than one file to include. Notice the starting space> Description: <short description; defaults to some wise words> Meta-Package for vanilla kernel built based on debian .config
Now it’s time to build the actual package by calling
equivs-build my-kernel-package
The result is a slick deb-file that can be imported in your repository. I use Sonatype Nexus.
Clients just need to add the repository to their sources.list and add the PGP key and we are ready to roll.
