Background

10/21/09 - Initial guide written by CC

Forewarning

     The Zen kernel is not supported by Arch. Do not report problems with the Zen kernel to them. Use at your own risk!

Choosing a pkgbuild, configuring, building, and installing

      The main process for arch is to build the kernel using a "pkgbuild." There are currently 2 pkgbuilds available in the AUR repository for the Zen kernel. These are:

kernel-2.6-zen: This pkgbuild is for stable releases of the Zen kernel, will not compile in -rc releases, download it from HERE.

kernel-2.6-zen-next: This pkgbuild, conversely, is for -rc releases of the Zen kernel (not a git pkgbuild), download it from HERE.

1. Choose which pkgbuild you want, and navigate over to the URLs as listed above.
2. Download the pkgbuild tarball and extract it, for the sake of the tutorial I will simply demonstrate on kernel-2.6-zen and I'll do everything within the /home/user directory.

cd /home/user
wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/kernel26-zen/kernel26-zen.tar.gz
tar zxvpf kernel26-zen.tar.gz
cd kernel26-zen

3.  Replace the config or config.x86_64 with your own files (optional) - it's reccomended to make a custom configuration, if you are new to this, please checkout kernel-seeds.org - and read the instructions there.
You also need to change the checksum in the PKGBUILD if you inserted a custom configuration.
The PKGBUILD will automatically run menuconfig before you build too.

cp /boot/myconfig config.x86_64 # I'm on 64bit, otherwise just put it to config

makepkg -g # Should display checksum information
vim PKGBUILD # Replace the corresponding md5sum with your editor of choice

4.  Start the kernel build

pacman -U kernel26-2.6.x.y-zen-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz