GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Getting Started

The first step is to install the appropriate packages:

  bin86
  kernel-package
  kernel-source-2.4.16
  debconf-utils
  alsa-source-0.5       (if you need ALSA's extra sound support)
  pcmcia-source

For the particular release of Debian being used the version numbers will be different. The kernel-package provides tools to generate, from the compiled kernel image, a genuine Debian package that you simply install as a standard type package. The resulting package can be installed (and uninstalled) cleanly and correctly with dpkg and wajig.

Note that you do not need the kernel-headers package as all the headers required are in the kernel-source package. The headers were split out for other reasons (compiling other packages without installing all of the kernel sources).

Installing the kernel-source package simply places the archived kernel source file (kernel-source-2.4.16.tar.bz2) into /usr/src. Similarly for any kernel modules you wish to also install (like alsa). Extract the actual source code into /usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.16:

  # cd /usr/src
  # tar jxvf kernel-source-2.4.16.tar.bz2
  # tar zxvf alsa-driver-0.5.tar.gz 
  # tar zxvf pcmcia-cs.tar.gz

You can also obtain a more recent (or even just any different) version of the kernel from the net yourself and still use the Debian kernel-package utilities.