Estimated build time: &kernel-time-headers; Estimated required disk space: &kernel-compsize-headers;   We won't be compiling a new kernel yet -- we'll do that when we have finished the installation of all the packages. But as some packages need the kernel header files, we're going to unpack the kernel archive now, set it up and copy the header files so they can be found by these packages. It is important to note that the files in the kernel source directory are not owned by root. Whenever you unpack a package as user root (like we do here inside chroot), the files end up having the user and group IDs of whatever they were on the packager's computer. This is usually not a problem for any other package you install because you remove the source tree after the installation. But the Linux kernel source tree is often kept around for a long time, so there's a chance that whatever user ID the packager used will be assigned to somebody on your machine and then that person would have write access to the kernel source. In light of this, you might want to run chown -R 0:0 on the linux-&kernel-version; directory to ensure all files are owned by user root. Prepare for header installation: make mrproper This ensures that the kernel tree is absolutely clean. The kernel team recommends that this command be issued prior to each kernel compilation. You shouldn't rely on the source tree being clean after untarring. Create the include/linux/version.h file: make include/linux/version.h Create the platform-specific include/asm symlink: make symlinks Install the platform specific-header files: cp -HR include/asm /usr/include cp -R include/asm-generic /usr/include Install the cross-platform kernel header files: cp -R include/linux /usr/include There are a few kernel header files which make use of the autoconf.h header file. Since we do not yet configure the kernel, we need to create this file ourselves in order to avoid compilation failures. Create an empty autoconf.h file: touch /usr/include/linux/autoconf.h &c6-kernel-exp-headers;