Here's a how-to for building a recent Linux kernel on your Debian GNU/Linux box: You will need to do all this as root. It's serious business building new Linux kernels :) su - The dash after the su command makes it behave as if you had logged in as root directly, a full login environment is applied. Make sure you have the required tools and libraries installed: apt install build-essential initramfs-tools procps libncurses5-dev fakeroot git-core screen zlib1g-dev flex bison bc libelf-dev:native libssl-dev:native Use git to clone Linus' latest git repo: cd /usr/src git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git This will take a long time: Cloning into 'linux'... remote: Counting objects: 2725713, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (412816/412816), done. remote: Total 2725713 (delta 2286272), reused 2725359 (delta 2285962) Receiving objects: 100% (2725713/2725713), 559.28 MiB | 3.30 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (2286272/2286272), done. Once you