Pretty much all important stuff to be said about these packages has already been covered either in the What is? or the Release Notes. The packages are primarily intended for the Fedora distribution and are distributed in the .rpm format for easy installation and deployment in that platform.

There are also packages available with the source for the binary packages, notably a kernel patch and a source rpm package.

Installation.

To install the binary packages, once they have been downloaded they will have to be installed from the command line as the root user, so either use a root xterm or su to root, and install in the usual way:


Warning! The packages require to be forced to successfully be installed. This is not a bug, but a feature™! As these packages are not intended to replace the Fedora official packages. Substitue <arch> with your architecture (either amd64, athlon, i686 or x86_64).

Use the source, Tux.

The src.rpm

If you require to install additional drivers like graphics drivers installed from source packages, you will also require to install the kernel-devel package, with the same method as described above.

The src.rpm package offers the opportunity to further tweak the kernel for your particular system (and you may even extend the rpmbuild infrastructure to build for other, not supported by these packages, architectures), however that requires further tweaking. The details on how to build an .rpm kernel from a .src.rpm package are beyond the scope of this document, however here are some brief instructions:

Assuming you already have a sane rpmbuild environment, and that you know already know how to build a kenrel from source, and you know your way around rpm packaging (at least a bit), after installing the .src.rpm, you can futher tweak your kernel by following the next simple steps:

1. Prepare the source tree so that kernel configuration is easier, ideally you would do so with your system's architecture as the target, so from your rpmbuild environment:
   
   rpmbuild -bp --target=<arch> SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec
   
   That will create the necesary infrastructure for you to procede and further tweak the kernel configuration, so all you have to do is copy your architecture's config file to the BUILD/kernel<version>/linux<version> directory as .config and start your favorite kenrel configuration tool. When done, just remember to save the file as the original (in SOURCES/kernel-<version>-<arch>.config).
   
   Note: For those daring, there is the option to manually edit the config, this option, however is never recommended.
   
2. Once you have your modified config in place, make sure you add the following as the first line of the config file:
   
   # <arch>
   
   Again, here arch is either i386 or x86_64, unless you have modified in any way the kernel spec file.
   
   
3. Procede to build the kernel RPMs:
   
   rpmbuild -bb --target=<arch> SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec
   
   Note: Building for single architectures will build both the UP and SMP configurations (look at the archtecture definitions) if you don't want to build either, you should modify the .spec.
   
   
4. When done, install your kernel and be happy.

The patch.

To install the patch you require a vanilla 2.6.15 kenrel from Kernel.org (as the patch already includes patch up to 2.6.15.1), and you only require to decompress the kenrel somewhere in your hard disk and then apply the patch. The easiest way is by decompressing the patch also, apply from within the kenrel directory like so:

patch -p1 -i /path/to/blackhawk-2.6.15.patch

Configure and build as usual. If you don't know how to build a kernel from source, consult one of the many howtos over at tldp.

Fedora and the Fedora logo are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the US And other countries.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Best viewed at 1024x768 resolution.
Any suggestions or complaints about this site? Please contact me.