I lost count of the number of times someone told me I was nuts for wanting to compile a new kernel Why not get a new different distro of Linux that works on a specific machine? What is wrong with the kernel that comes with the distro? There are reasons for compiling a new kernel.

I never found good documentation on upgrading/compiling linux kernel in Debian, Most of the time I stuck in between and my running libs gets corrupted, then same story; Put new hard disk, Install latest Debian, mount old HDD and copy all the contents.

After reading documents in net, I setup my step-by-step Linux kernel up-gradation (Bash Scripts) in Debian. Up-till now I upgraded more than 5 Debian kernels without any problem.

"Installing Emacs 22 on Debian Etch doesn’t need to be a painful experience. While installing from source is perfectly doable, some people will want to use the Debian packaging system. Emacs 22 is now in Sid but it didn’t make it yet to Etch backports..."

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Debian Etch server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers.

Security is based on three characteristics: prevention, protection and detection. Grsecurity is a patch for Linux kernel that allows you to increase each of these points. This howto was performed on a Debian Lenny system. Thus some tools are Debian specific. However, tasks can be performed with other distro specific tools or even with universal tools (make).

The Debian project has been working in removing non-free firmware from the Linux kernel shipped with Debian for the past two release cycles. At the time of the releases of Debian 4.0 "Etch" and 5.0 "Lenny", however, it was not yet possible to ship Linux kernels stripped of all non-free firmware bits.

"...'Etch and a half' is Debian’s desire to support hardware that requires updated drivers. This marks the first time the Debian project updates several core packages in its stable distribution without security implications and demonstrates its huge dedication for their users..."

Most agree that with the release of Debian Etch, with it’s very intuitive installer that even makes things like setting up LVM and software RAID a breeze, there is now a stable Debian distribution that is close to the usability level of Ubuntu as long as you have well-supported hardware and don’t mind using slightly older software.

This article shows how you can install Ruby on Rails (RoR) and integrate it in Apache2 on a Debian Etch system (including a short section at the end showing how to use RoR in a web site created with ISPConfig).