I haven’t been writing on my blog for quite a while and I guess now I should, well actually The Kernel Development just released kernel 2.6.34.1, so I have a good reason for adding a new post :) .

This kernel really stayed in the cooker for some time, as version 2.6.34 was release two months ago. I will take this long period, their idea to make sure that everything works and most bugs and issues are fixed, otherwise I can’t explain the two months delay between releases.

Now to go strait to this release, which is called Blackjack (has nothing to do with the card games :) ), I will just tell you that this kernel has been build a bit differently, doesn’t have BFS anymore, has enabled Dynamic Ticks, patched the kernel with aufs and lzma support for squashfs4 and left out unionfs. The idea with this kernel is that in case you wanna build your own Live CD, based on the installation on your computer, you can do it really easily as aufs and squashfs4 are there and working right. BFS (brain fuck scheduler) was removed as it wasn’t really giving the kernel anything in plus, actually in some cases it even slowed down the overall system and Dynamic Ticks where enabled, because in some cases power management wasn’t working so well without it. In rest the kernel comes as usually, with all the goodies, drivers and custom build. I think this might be the most successful build of mine yet.

The ChangeLog of this new kernel release is a bit too big so I wont put it here, but you can always check it at: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.34.1.

OK! Enough with the blablabla, lets go directly to the download part (pick a mirror from where you can download this kernel):

Mirror US/CA: http://dl.robertalks.com/kernel/2.6.34.1-blackjack/
Mirror EU/CZ: http://mirror.visualserver.org/kernel/2.6.34.1-blackjack/

The basic installation is simple and you will need root access or sudo access, plus dpkg. Here is how (use –force-all to make sure it will install it, it can happen that on older system will run into an error, for example on Ubuntu 8.04, but with –force-all it will be installed and it will work):

sudo dpkg -i –force-all linux-image-2.6.34.1-blackjack_2.6.34.1-1_i386.deb

For those of you who want or need to rebuild the kernel, you can download the source code with the config file from the links above, as I wrote before there wont be anymore included kernel source archive, but you will have a package called linux-source-2.6.34.1-blackjack_2.6.34.1-1_i386.deb which contains the kernel source code with the patches.

I am your father, Luke! (don’t like Start Wars, but they do have some good lines :) )