Background

10/20/09 - Initial guide written by CC

Forewarning

     The Zen kernel is not supported by debian, ubuntu, or any other debian based distribution you may be running. Do not report problems with the Zen kernel to these projects. Use at your own risk!

Patching or Fetching the kernel source

      The first step is to obtain the zen kernel source. There are two ways you can do this, by either patching a vanilla source or by cloning the tree with git.

 

+ More up to date

+ Do not have to get a new kernel source and re-patch on update (git pull)
+ Switch between any tagged release allowing switch to an older version

- Much bigger image than vanilla source

+ Smaller image

- No transitional patches means a new source is needed for each update (Updating isn't as simple as git, for each update you need to get a clean source and patch)

- Patches (unless patches are created with gitweb) are not always as up to date as the git repositories.

 
1. The first step is to make sure that you have all of the required packages installed to compile a kernel

sudo apt-get install kernel-package build-essential libncurses5-dev

I want to clone GIT

Absolutely! Please read up on the GIT Based installation/management guide and skip the next part about patching the kernel.

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Forget that! I want to patch my kernel!

Sure, we absolutely support this method.
1. Select a patch from http://downloads.zen-kernel.org page, and download it.
2. Go over to http://kernel.org and download the base kernel source (for example, a 2.6.31 based release such as 2.6.31-zen4 would require the linux-2.6.31.tar.bz2 source, NOT the 2.6.31.y source! - Same for any base kernel release, 2.6.32-rc5-zen1 would require linux-2.6.32-rc5.tar.bz2 and so on)
3. CD into the kernel source directory and apply the zen patch, example:

cd linux-2.6.31
bzcat 2.6.31-zen4.patch.bz2 | patch -p1 # For bz2 format, alternatively if the patch is in gzip or lzma use zcat or lzcat

Configuring, Compiling, and Installing the kernel source

Now in your kernel source directory
1. Configure the kernel. If you are not sure about how to configure the kernel, see google and/or use a kernel seed to create a configuration (easier than starting from scratch, but achieves the same effect)
2. Compile the kernel the debian way, run "man make-kpkg" for information about additional options such as CONCURRENCY_LEVEL

sudo make-kpkg --initrd kernel_image kernel_headers
# It seems like every time i've installed debian/ubuntu i've had permission errors, this is usually the problem
chmod g-s /usr/src/linux-2.6-zen -R

3. Install the kernel packages

cd ..
sudo dpkg -i linux-image*.deb
sudo dpkg -i linux-headers*.deb

Rebooting to the new kernel

That's all there is to it. Now you can reboot the system and you should see the new kernel selectable in the grub menu. Choose it and boot it.