I wanted to post some screen shots of a kernel compilation, but they have to wait. I think that as of now, I can provide a collection of troubleshooting tips. I did not learn computer science in college or school, it all comes to me due to experimentation, doing mistakes, correcting them and learning from Google. So this post is written from the point of view of a newbie who might be new to Linux or new to the kernel and finds problems in compiling the kernel. Lets discuss about what the hell can go wrong.

The first time I had to compile the kernel, I downloaded kernel source code from kernel.org on a Windows machine. Out of excitement to see the code, I uncompressed it using Winrar (code was in .tar.bz2 format). I glanced at the code, made a .rar again through winrar, did an ftp to my Linux machine and tried to compile it using usual steps. It gave errors during compilation. Errors in the source code! Now that seemed impossible so I read and read and found out what the problem was. WINRAR.

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