unable to install linux-image-2.6.15-27-686 into feisty - zero sized initrd image

[Martin Man]

I have dist-upgraded to feisty today and reinstalled old linux image 2.6.15, in order to build one of my 3rd party kernel modules which is not available yet for 2.6.20. I have been unable to boot the system because automatically generated initrd has zero size, see below:

--- cut (apt-get install linux-image-2.6.15-27-686) ---

Setting up linux-image-2.6.15-27-686 (2.6.15-27.50) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-27-686
W: udev hook script requires at least kernel version 2.6.19
W: not generating requested initramfs for kernel 2.6.15-27-686
/boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-27-686 points to /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-27-686 -- doing nothing at /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-2.6.15-27-686.postinst line 565.
/vmlinuz does not exist. Installing from scratch, eh?
Or maybe you don't want a symbolic link here. Hmm? Lets See.

root@esher:~# ls -l /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-27-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 21:59 /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-27-686

--- /cut ---

I don't know what's happening here, seems like older kernels can't be installed anymore ?

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

That's not a bug (especially not a bug in 2.6.15). We don't support booting 2.6.15 kernels on feisty.

If all you want to do is compile the modules, you only need the linux-headers packages for 2.6.15.