Building a Kernel Lab, Then a Plan to Use It

I’ve wanted to contribute to the Linux kernel for a while. The gap was never desire — it was that I had no safe place to break things. This is the note of closing that gap in an afternoon, and the plan I wrote so the momentum doesn’t evaporate. --- ## First, finish what was half-done # The lab box was supposed to be on Debian 13 (trixie). It wasn’t — not really. base-files reported trixie, but sources.list still pointed at bookworm and 401 packages were stranded at Debian 12 versions. A dist-upgrade had stalled partway and had its sources quietly reverted. A split-brain machine.